Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  It was just this sort of mystery that had led her to the Colosseum in the first place. The envelope that was now sitting on the tiny desk in her hotel room had been sent to her by an Italian professor of botany she’d met online in a plant DNA chat room. (That such a place even existed would have given Christine a month’s worth of material, but Sloane couldn’t have cared less.) The envelope the man had sent her had contained a single seed he’d collected at the opening of one of the runoff drainage tunnels deep in the second level of the hypogeum—a single seed that Sloane had analyzed down to its DNA core.

  A single seed that contained proteins much older than it should have, older than the Colosseum itself. In fact, that single seed had contained DNA fragments that—if Sloane’s science was correct—predated the construction of the city of Rome.

  So Sloane had immediately begun the process that had led her, three weeks later, to a narrowing tunnel in the depths of the hypogeum. She was certain that analyzing the DNA history of this bizarre seed, and the plant it must have come from, would be just the sort of research to secure continued funding for her work—and maybe jump her right to that full professorship.

  Her calves still burning from the trip across the ditch, she came to another bend in the tunnel and another gradual slope downward. The roof seemed to be getting lower as well; she had to bend a few inches at the waist to keep the top of her high ponytail from touching the curved stone panels, or catching on what was left of the rusting iron clamps that held them in place. This was the fifth, maybe sixth turn in tunnel since she’d entered the runoff channel pictured on the back of the envelope, the place where her Italian colleague had found the strange seed. The fact that she’d entered the tunnel in the first place had surprised her; the Italian professor had been content with the single seed, rather than chancing what could very well have been an unexplored section of the hypogeum. But Sloane was determined; a seed was one thing, a living plant would be her own Holy Grail.

  As she turned the corner and shined the miniature flashlight down into the narrowing space, she saw something that made her forget about the heat tearing through her calves.

  The vine twisting and tangling across two connected slabs of stone was unlike anything she had ever seen before. Red-tinged, almost leafless, it was covered in thorns, many as big as her thumb. She racked her brain for any memories of anything even remotely similar as she quickly covered the distance. There was a vine she’d seen in a textbook, incredibly rare, something that had been discovered growing at some sort of religious shrine near an Egyptian village along the Nile, that had a similar red tinge to it. And another vine, with thorns of a similar shape, that she’d read about explorers documenting during a trip through Equatorial New Guinea.

  But now that she was only a few feet away, reaching into her backpack to retrieve her latex gloves and her plastic specimen containers, she knew that what she was looking at had never been written about in any textbook. As she pulled the gloves on over her long fingers, holding the flashlight in her teeth, she could even make out a few of the vine’s little seeds hanging beneath reddish bulbs between some of the thorns—the same shape, color, and texture as the seed her colleague had found at the entrance to the runoff.

  Sloane was looking at something both new and very, very old. Still not daring to touch the plant, even gloved, she followed its structure with her eyes. Twisting and turning, she traced it up the stone to a seam at the very top, right against one of the iron clamps, where the vine seemed to disappear into the very structure of the tunnel wall.

  Curiouser and curiouser. She glanced up toward the ceiling at the tiny fissures still letting wisps of early sunlight into the confines of the tunnel. Not much light, but certainly enough for the processes of photosynthesis. Plants grew in some of the deepest caves ever found, and thousands of feet below the surface of the oceans. Unlike humans, plants had found ways to survive in the harshest climates imaginable.

  But as Sloane moved even closer to the vines—her face now just inches away from the angry-looking red thorns and leafless stems—she noticed something even more peculiar than the way the vine seemed to vanish into the stones.

  She wasn’t sure, but she thought she could make something out behind the tangle of vine, something carved right into the wall of the tunnel. She couldn’t imagine that anything man-made would rival the botanical beauty she had just discovered, but she found herself intrigued enough to take a look.

  With extreme care, doing everything she could to avoid the thorns, she gingerly began pulling the red vines apart. At first, it was difficult; the vines seemed to pull back against her, and twice her hands almost slipped, her gloved fingers almost touching one of the oversize thorns. But then the vine started to give way. A moment later, she’d gotten through the twists and tangles and found herself face-to-face with a visage carved directly into the ancient stone wall.

  A woman’s face. Vaguely African, wearing what appeared to be an Egyptian headdress. Beneath the face, also carved into the stone, were row after row of Roman letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  Christ. As a botanist, Sloane had studied a little Latin and Greek to better understand the various names of the plants beneath her microscopes, but apart from that, her grasp of ancient languages was pretty weak. The hieroglyphics were just pictures to her. But she could make out some of the Latin; specifically, halfway down the lettering, she recognized a single name: Cleopatra. Beyond that, her best guess was that the writing was some sort of dedication to the famed female pharaoh.

  She paused, her gloved hands still holding back the vines. She wasn’t certain, but she believed that Cleopatra would have been born right around the time of the construction of the Colosseum. She knew from the movies and television shows Christine had gabbed on about that Cleopatra had some sort of romantic involvement with a couple different Roman leaders: Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. But other than that, she couldn’t fathom why someone had carved a picture and dedication to Cleopatra into one of the greatest Roman constructions.

  As she pondered the question, her gaze drifted back to the hieroglyphics. Most of it was strange squiggles and incomprehensible shapes; but then her eyes settled on an image that was strangely familiar:

  Two opposing snakes twisted together, intertwined in what appeared to be a double helix. At the very bottom, the tail of one of the snakes twisted off in the wrong direction—but other than the tail, the snakes seemed to be in a very close approximation to the shape of DNA.

  Sloane smiled, chiding herself for letting her own mental character color what she was looking at; the double helix was a fairly common geometric image, and it wasn’t always associated with DNA. In fact, double helixes had been popping up in artwork, archaeology, and mathematical modeling since well before the discovery of DNA. Sloane remembered reading somewhere that there were even ancient Sumerian tablets imprinted with double helixes, dating back more than eight thousand years.

  Still, the image was incredibly compelling. As Sloane peered closer, she noticed that there were tiny scratch marks along both snakes, segmenting them into seven perfectly symmetrical pieces. Without even thinking about what she was doing, she reached forward with a finger and brushed it along the errant tail.

  With a start, she realized that the tail wasn’t simply carved into the wall; it was attached to the stone by some sort of internal mechanism—and it was movable. Even the slightest pressure of her gloved finger against the tail caused it to shift a few centimeters.

  Almost by reflex, she used a second finger to push the errant tail back toward its symmetrical opposite, completing the perfect double helix. With a click, the tail locked into place.

  There was a two second lag—and then suddenly, the sound of stone grinding against stone reverberated through the tunnel. The stone face of Cleopatra trembled—and then slid down, disappearing beneath the tangle of red vines.

  In Cleopatra’s place, Sloane found herself staring at a vivid, brightly colored painting. The painting was
nearly twice as large as the face that had covered it, much of it hidden behind the vines that Sloane could only partially hold back. But she could clearly make out an incredible scene: a group of women carrying what looked to be white javelins, marching out of an incredibly detailed forest. The women were impressive; warriors, obviously, girded for war. But Sloane’s attention was drawn to the forest. Some of the plant life she could recognize; ancient fronds from various palm families, cedars and fig trees from different parts of the Middle East, Baobabs and Mesquites from the Horn of Africa. Others were complete mysteries. And then she saw the red vines, curling around the warrior women’s feet, nearly covering the ground where they were walking on their way out of the forest.

  She realized it wasn’t a forest, it was a garden. These disparate trees and plants wouldn’t be found together, wouldn’t survive together, unless they had been brought there, planted, and tended.

  Sloane used one hand to reach into her backpack and retrieve a small scalpel and one of her plastic specimen containers. Carefully, she leaned forward and scraped a tiny portion of the painting into the plastic well. She wasn’t certain, but bright paint like that, from an ancient origin, was most likely botanical in origin.

  It wasn’t until she had sealed the container with the paint chip and placed it into her backpack that she noticed what the tribe of female warriors was carrying on their way out of the garden.

  A flat stone tile—and chiseled directly into the stone, a single, segmented gold snake.

  When Sloane touched the object with her fingers, she realized that one of the segments was raised a few centimeters above the rest. As she pressed at the seams, the segment clicked out of the stone and into her gloved palm.

  She stepped back, holding the snake segment in her open hand. It was heavy, like a paperweight, and when she turned it on one end, she could see that it was filled with what appeared to be mechanical gears. She also noticed that the gold coloring was just plate; the snake segment seemed to be made out of bronze.

  Sloane stood there for what seemed like a very long time, trying to make sense of what she had found. Something mechanical and bronze, hidden behind vines that predated the Roman Colosseum by centuries. An object placed behind a dedication to the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra, one of the most powerful women in human history. An artifact found by solving a puzzle involving a double helix, the shape of the building block of life.

  None of it made any sense—but there was no question that Sloane had stumbled into something much bigger than a strange little seed.

  She placed the bronze snake segment in her backpack, next to the sealed flake of ancient paint. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and took a half dozen photos of the painting on the stone. Then she turned and started back through the labyrinthine tunnels of the hypogeum, toward the waiting Polizia.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There is nothing more final than an autopsy table.

  Jack tried his best to keep his attention focused on the stack of forms on the low counter ahead of him, but his gaze kept wandering across the harshly lit pathology lab to the pair of empty tables by the far wall. The corrugated aluminum frames, the eggshell-blue operating slabs, the shiny, stainless steel blood gutters that ran along each edge. Jack was thankful that both tables were empty, but he knew that at that very moment, in one of the half dozen other labs down the narrow hallway from where they’d sequestered him, his brother was on a table just like those.

  Jack noticed that his fingers were trembling as he moved his pen across one of the forms. The woman with the bouffant of gunmetal gray hair standing next to him at the counter must have noticed too, because she put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You don’t have to do this right now. The paperwork can wait.”

  Jack hadn’t realized there would be so many forms to fill out when your brother was murdered. Medical histories, insurance documents, autopsy permissions—and all this was in addition to what he’d gone through at the police station when he’d first arrived back in Boston. Three hours in a room with two detectives who had many more questions than answers.

  “Is there anyone else we can call?” the woman asked, echoing the refrain from the police inquiry, after they’d realized that Jack knew very little about his brothers’ day-to-day life.

  In fact, in many ways, his twin brother was a stranger to Jack, going back deep into childhood. The only who who’d truly known his brother was their mother, and she had died almost a decade ago. Jack had already left a dozen messages for their father on the most recent voice-mail number he had stored in his phone, but he didn’t expect to see the man stroll into the pathology wing of Mass General anytime soon. It had been over a year since Kyle Grady’s last contact—a brief e-mail from a double blind server somewhere deep in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the elder Grady was about to embark on his latest adventure. Something about a lost tribe and a mythical Maasai warlord; Jack had long ago given up trying to keep track of their father’s whereabouts. The last time the man had gone off on an exploration, he had been out of touch for more than four years. Then he’d shown up out of the blue, right in the middle of an Introduction to Anthropology seminar Jack had been giving to a group of incoming freshman at Princeton; just wandered right to the front of Jack’s classroom, plopping his worn leather saddlebag down on Jack’s desk, launching into a meandering tale about some epic jaunt up the tallest peak in the Andes, where he’d gone to live with a family of Sherpas for some book he was writing. Jack didn’t even know if the voice-mail number was current—not that it mattered. By now, Kyle Grady was probably so deep in the bush, garbed in a grass skirt and covered in Maasai war paint, Jack wouldn’t have recognized him if he’d walked through the door.

  Which was just as well, because his brother, Jeremy, had always hated their father. Even before their parents had gotten divorced, Kyle Grady had no idea how to interact with a kid as introverted and troubled as Jeremy, and he’d pretty much ignored Jack’s twin when he wasn’t off in some foreign land, living with pygmies or shepherds or tribesmen. After the divorce, their mother had raised Jeremy exclusively. Jack had gone back and forth between both parents; at seventeen, for the last year before he shipped off to Princeton, he’d even moved in with his father full-time. It had been a learning experience. A dozen times over the year, his father had simply disappeared for weeks on end. No warning, no food left in the refrigerator, no money or car keys or even a checkbook to pay for electricity or heat.

  “There’s no one else,” Jack said, steadying the pen against the top form.

  “No friends? Colleagues?”

  Jack knew that the woman was trying to be helpful. The hospital had assigned her to wait with him while the autopsy was taking place down the hall. She probably had a psychology degree, and spent most of her time gently patting the shoulders of people who’d just lost family members.

  “I’m sure he has colleagues. I doubt he had any friends.”

  It was a terrible thought, but Jack knew it was true. Jeremy was different, or as their mother liked to put it, special. The smartest person Jack had ever met, a whiz with numbers and computers who couldn’t carry on the most basic conversation with a stranger to save his life. As far as Jack knew, Jeremy had never gone to a party, gone on a date, or even had dinner with anyone who wasn’t a blood relation. He was probably somewhere on the Autism-Asperger continuum, though their mother would never have allowed anyone to label him. She was the reason he’d been able to go so far; halfway through his PhD at MIT, a brilliant programmer who would have probably ended up in a backroom at Google or Facebook, making millions.

  Except now, he was lying on an autopsy table, filling those stainless-steel gutters as a pathologist gathered evidence for the detectives who were still sifting their way through the crime scene.

  Even twenty-four hours after a janitor had found the body and called the police, the detectives still had almost nothing to go on. According to the officers who had questioned Jack when he’d arrived off the pl
ane, the high security laboratory where they’d found Jeremy’s body had been scoured clean; no fingerprints, no shoeprints, no hair follicles, no DNA, and no murder weapon. No sign of forced entry; although from what Jack could gather, the underground lab wasn’t exactly Fort Knox. Jeremy hadn’t had clearance, but he’d had no trouble fooling his way in. The detectives were still trying to reconstruct Jeremy’s last few days; nobody knew him well enough to have any idea what he was working on that would lead him to that particular lab. The head of his department, a Professor Earl Johnson, had described Jeremy as an “autonomous coding machine,” meaning nobody really kept tabs on him. At MIT, that was par for the course: The merely smart had to follow the rules, but true genius roamed free.

  “We weren’t very close,” Jack added.

  The tinge of guilt that moved through him at the words was palpable. The distance between Jack and Jeremy was something that had bothered him since their teenage years. Many times, he’d tried to address it—a late night phone call, a long, emotional letter, an impromptu visit. None of his efforts had ever led anywhere. A phone call with Jeremy was like speaking into a tape recorder. Maybe you got a noise here and there when it was time to turn over the tape, but otherwise you were talking to yourself. Letters went unanswered, and visits invariably ended in an argument.