Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  The detectives had been shocked at the idea that Jeremy hadn’t made a single outgoing call; Jack only felt embarrassment. Four calls in six months, and none of them lasting over ten minutes. Mostly just logistics surrounding his most recent visit to Boston.

  Jack turned back to the chalk outline. He tried not to picture his brother lying there, gasping for air as the blood ran from his body. Reaching out for help, clawing at the floor, maybe trying to find some way to fight back, or to drag himself away from whoever had come to kill him.

  And then Jack saw something glinting in the fluorescent light, about a foot beyond the chalk that designated his brother’s extended right hand. A small item in a tagged plastic evidence bag, jammed right up against one of the brassy metal legs of the glass desk.

  The item in the bag was almost the same color as the desk leg; even from a few feet away, one might easily have missed it, especially in the glare from the fluorescent lights. But the CSI specialists had dutifully marked, and probably fingerprinted and photographed, the object. Eventually, they’d bring it to an evidence locker, when they’d finished reconstructing the last minutes of Jeremy’s life.

  Jack crawled closer, then gingerly reached for the plastic evidence bag. Holding it in his hands, he was surprised to feel a brief smile moving across his lips. He hadn’t known that his brother had kept the scarab that he’d given Jeremy after his first expedition. It was just like Jeremy, to turn something that was supposed to be sentimental into something useful—a keychain. Still, the very idea that his brother carried the gift with him—that he had it on him when he died—touched Jack deep inside.

  He decided he would ask for the scarab back when the investigators were done with it; as little and insignificant as it might be, it was a memento of maybe one instance in their relationship that was almost something normal between brothers. Jack was about to place the bag back where he’d found it when his gloved finger felt something through the plastic—a hard edge, right where the scarab had been fitted with the key ring. Jack looked closer—and realized that Jeremy hadn’t just glued the ring to the souvenir golden beetle; he’d drilled a hole in the thing, hollowed it out, then attached the ring through the scarab’s core. And aside from the ring, it appeared that Jeremy had jammed something else into the hollow core, so deep that only the tiniest edge was still visible. Something hard and plastic, about the size of a thumb.

  Jack unsealed the evidence bag and shook the scarab out into his palm. He turned it carefully on its side, and used two fingers to pull the plastic object loose.

  A computer thumb drive.

  Jack stared at the drive, his mind churning. He knew that the right thing to do would be to head straight to the police station and turn the drive over to the detectives working his brother’s homicide. If Jeremy had been using the computers in the secure lab to do something that had led to his murder, the thumb drive might contain evidence that could point to the person who’d killed him.

  Then Jack turned from the thumb drive to the golden scarab, still in his other palm. The thumb drive hadn’t been in a coat pocket or in a wallet; it had been jammed inside a gift from his twin brother. Jack knew he might be reaching—but his brother was a logical person, to a fault. Like a computer trying to get by in a world full of people.

  The thought struck him, like a mallet to his chest.

  What if his brother had put the thumb drive in the scarab for a reason?

  Jack exhaled, his hand closing over the drive. With his other hand, he carefully placed the empty scarab back into the evidence bag, resealed it, and placed it right where he had found it, against the leg of the desk.

  Then he rose to his feet. He gave one last look at the outline on the floor, and then headed for the door. In his mind, it really was just chalk now, a drawing, nothing more. Jeremy was gone; but just maybe, he’d left something behind, in a place he knew his brother might look.

  Maybe the detectives had been wrong. Maybe Jeremy had made one last, outgoing call.

  • • •

  “This is incredible.”

  Jack collapsed against the bench like a rag doll as Andy lowered himself to an inelegant squat on the grass in front of him, his laptop already open. They’d been going through the contents of the thumb drive for the past hour—walking like zombies, tracing near circles around the MIT campus, Andy holding his laptop open in front of them like it was some sort of handheld GPS machine. Somewhere between the Infinite Corridor and Killian Court, the grass-covered area in front of Building Ten and the Great Dome where they now found themselves, the sky had gone from a deep, almost purple shade of black to a canopy of grays.

  “It’s pretty hard to accept,” Jack said, rubbing his eyes. The manicured glade in front of them seemed to stretch out the length of a football field, bordered on either side by brick and stone buildings, and directly ahead, by the architecturally striking Building Ten with its façade dominated by ten Ionic columns, and topped by its Great Dome. The building—loosely modeled on the Parthenon in Greece—was geographically at the epicenter of the MIT campus, which was why most graduates knew it as The Center of the Universe. At the moment, sitting there, Jack felt the opposite; his universe had just lost its center, and everything seemed untethered, buffeted by a maddening wind.

  “No,” Andy said. “I mean this is incredibly fucking awesome. If this is true—but it can’t be true, can it?”

  Jack could see the screen’s reflection flashing across Andy’s high cheekbones. The glowing double helix that represented the two sets of six of the Seven Wonders of the World. If it hadn’t been Jeremy—and if Jeremy wasn’t lying open on an autopsy table at that very moment—he wouldn’t have believed it. A link between the Ancient Wonders and the Modern Wonders? The Ancient Wonders of the World had been chosen by ancient Greek historians, but the Modern Wonders were the result of a worldwide vote. And besides, they spanned centuries—millennia, even. How could they possible be linked?

  Jack exhaled, then looked past Andy, across the long glade of grass. Other than a lone figure, probably a student, sitting on a bench maybe fifty yards away in the shade of one of the many pin oaks that straddled the open courtyard, the place was deserted.

  “I guess it’s possible that the vote was manipulated,” he finally said. “The contest was run by a Swiss corporation; the results were announced on July 7, 2007, in Lisbon. Over one hundred million people supposedly voted—but it wasn’t like people were signing their names to a list.”

  “That’s something we could look into,” Andy said. “If someone manipulated the voting, there might be some way to hack into the data and find evidence.”

  Jack nodded. But that was only a small part of the bizarre mystery that Jeremy had uncovered. The rigged vote, though possible, didn’t answer the much, much bigger question.

  For what possible reason could six of the Seven Wonders of the World be linked? Built hundreds to thousands of years apart, by cultures vastly different, all over the world? And somehow, if Jeremy’s numbers were correct—and Jeremy’s numbers had always been correct—built in a pattern that mirrored six of the Ancient Wonders of the World?

  “Why only six of them?” Andy asked. “Why not Christ the Redeemer?”

  Jack pointed to a notation at the top corner of the computer screen, directly above the brilliant double helix.

  “There’s a second file. I think it might be some sort of answer.”

  In the ten minutes he’d had with Jeremy’s thumb drive before Andy had taken the laptop from him, he’d gone from simply staring in awe at the glowing double helix, to reading the few notations that had gone along with it—basically, latitudes and longitudes of each of the Seven Wonders, and the basic methodology his brother had used to match up the enantiomers. That’s when he had stumbled on the second file.

  Andy clicked on the link, and the double helix disappeared, replaced by an instantly recognizable image: Christ the Redeemer, the enormous statue of Jesus Christ on the peak of a mountain over
looking Rio, Brazil, arms spread wide as if to embrace the entire skyline. Then beneath the image, something quite incredible.

  “Am I looking at what I think I’m looking at?”

  Jack nodded again. It was mostly a set of numerical notations, but also just enough information to tell the story behind the numbers. His brother had found something odd about Christ the Redeemer; something about the topography of the Wonder that Jack was certain he’d never heard about before.

  “What does this mean?” Andy asked.

  Jack reached past him and hit the computer’s keyboard, shifting the screen back to the double helix. He wanted that image to sear itself into his brain; because if his growing suspicions were correct, that image was the reason his brother was lying on an autopsy table.

  “It means we pack our bags,” Jack said.

  Until Jack understood how such an image could exist—and who had been willing to kill Jeremy because of it—he was going to do everything in his power to follow the leads Jeremy had left them. No matter how long it took, or how far they had to go.

  For the moment, he only knew one thing for sure.

  The first step was a thousand miles away—two thousand feet up the peak of a mountain, in Rio.

  • • •

  Fifty yards away, the figure on the bench watched as Jack Grady and his graduate student closed the laptop and headed slowly through the center of Killian Court. The figure knew exactly where they were going; Jack Grady’s rental car, parked sixteen feet down an alley off of Memorial Drive, almost in the shadow of the Mass Avenue bridge. The figure waited until the two men reached the edge of the grassy court, their backs to her, before retrieving her cell phone from a pocket in her faded leather pants.

  She sent a text, then sat back against the bench, waiting for the response. Her entire body was pulsing, her muscles taut, controlled, and eager. Like a coiled spring, waiting for release.

  For most of the past day, since she had gotten her orders, she had been following and analyzing the two targets: Jack Grady, since he’d left the police station after his interrogation, and Andy Chen, the graduate student, since he’d checked into a nearby Marriott hotel. Phone records, bank accounts, credit cards—all of the usual information, which was now filed away for future use—but most importantly, their physical attributes and capabilities.

  Unlike his twin brother, Jack was tall and lean, well muscled, a natural athlete. His arm span was slightly above average, and his hands had some weight to them, with boxer’s knuckles. The other one was shorter, perhaps five-foot-six—no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. But of course, height and weight could be deceiving. She could not count the number of times she herself had been underestimated because of her angled form, because of her narrow hips. Because she was woman.

  She liked it when they underestimated her.

  She shifted her legs, feeling the blood heating within her coiled muscles.

  As soon as she received the text, she would be across the glade in less than eighty seconds. Four seconds after that, she would snap the neck of the graduate student with her bare hands. Six seconds after that, with a single blow three inches above the sternum, she would puncture Jack Grady’s aorta with his own shattered rib. Then she would retrieve the laptop computer, and whatever they had found in Jeremy Grady’s lab.

  She was still visualizing the mission in her head when the cell phone buzzed against her hand. As she read the words, her muscles uncoiled, the blood cooling in her veins.

  Jack Grady and his graduate student would not die tonight. The order was still the same; follow, analyze, and report.

  She closed the phone and slid it back into her pants. Her heart rate was now back to normal, and she reached behind her head, undid her tight ponytail, and let her jet-black hair cascade over her shoulders. Then she rose from the bench and began to stroll in the general direction of Memorial Drive and Jack Grady’s rental car.

  She was not disappointed. She knew that eventually, she would be given the order. And she would do exactly what she had been trained, from birth, to do. Like the seven ivory javelins in the quiver hanging down the center of her back, right up against her caramel-colored skin, she would strike with simplicity and speed—the living weapon that she was.

  Silent, precise, and absolutely deadly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “And they say diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

  Jendari Saphra feigned a smile as she slid her cell phone back into her Swarovski studded clutch, then took the last three steps that led from the mezzanine to the bottom floor of the grand, two-story hall. The ambient sound was near deafening here, just a few yards from the main clot of partygoers—four hundred of New York’s most elegantly coiffed financiers, fashionistas, and favored families, gossiping and dancing beneath the ninety-four-foot, twenty-one-thousand-pound blue whale suspended beneath the arched skylights. Even so Jendari had no trouble picking out the debonair, rotund octogenarian standing at the edge of the crowd, propped up between two twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian girls in matching silver Hervé Léger banded dresses, the material so tight around their serpentine curves they looked like something that had escaped from the Egyptian mummy exhibit on the third floor.

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty of those too, Mr. Agastine,” Jendari said, pausing for a brief moment as the phone beeped once from inside the crystal-lined purse—text received—then joined the trio in the shadow of the giant whale’s tail. “Although tonight I thought pearls seemed more appropriate.”

  Agastine laughed, the buttons straining to contain his inflated abdomen beneath the flaps of his Armani tuxedo. The Ukrainian girls continued to look bored and hungry.

  “It’s your party, Ms. Saphra. You can wear whatever you’d like.”

  Jendari waved her hand as if banishing such hyperbole from her presence; then she ran her fingers down the three strands of natural, uncultured pearls that hung down the front of her Neptune-blue, Versace sheath. The pearls had been harvested from the volcanic atolls of the French Polynesian islands at considerable expense; at fifty-eight, she’d never be mistaken for a mummified supermodel, but she could certainly still turn heads. Especially here among her peers, the glittering fools sipping imported champagne as they danced among the life-size models of giant squids eating sperm whales, dolphins frolicking through choppy waves, and walrus clans battling across imitation ice floes that populated the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.

  Agastine wasn’t wrong, of course; the invitations for the annual charity gala at the American Museum of Natural History might have listed a dozen corporate sponsors, and the RSVP insert might have been signed by the deputy mayor himself; but everyone in the room knew who had paid for the twenty-piece orchestra situated on the mezzanine, violinists lined up like so much krill, inches from the mouth of the great blue whale. Everyone knew who had draped the exterior of the monstrous museum—twenty-seven buildings in all, containing more than thirty-two million specimens, from one-of-a-kind dinosaur fossils, to meteors the size of compact cars, to ancient artifacts so rare and delicate they would never even be photographed, let alone displayed—with sparkling velvet tangles of blue that matched the whale, and more importantly, Jendari’s dress, for all the city to see.

  Last year, Jendari’s Saphra Industries had spent four million dollars on the gala, and then led the annual donations with another four million, to help reconstruct a coral reef off the Japanese coast that had been severely damaged by a pair of tanker spills the year before. This year, Saphra Industries was adding another four million to the cause; at this pace, Jendari often thought to herself, they’d be paving half the Pacific Ocean in coral, just so a bunch of wealthy Manhattanites could eat caviar bathed in the glow spilling out of Plexiglas tanks filled with faux bioluminescent eels swimming through schools of computerized jellyfish.

  Jendari had nothing against coral. In fact, she had a pair of magnificent chandeliers that had been carved out of endangered coral from the Great Barrier Reef hanging in one of h
er four homes in California, above a dining room table that she had never eaten off of, and probably never would. But she didn’t give tens of millions of dollars to the American Museum of Natural History every year because she was concerned about some insignificant life-form. A biological rounding error in the evolutionary equation had put mankind at the top of the food chain, and Jendari Saphra, with her billions in assets, her twenty homes in twelve countries on four continents, was at the top of the top. Her philanthropy had always served a purpose, ever since she had come into her own in her early thirties, and in this case, her millions hadn’t gone simply to prop up a species that was essentially a rock that could breathe.

  “We all do what we can,” Jendari said. A waiter in white tails spun by, offering a tray of specialty cocktails. Jendari accepted a martini glass filled with something viscous and blue, while Agastine went for one of the fruitier concoctions, vodka with chunks of pineapple and lychee dodging ice cubes in an oversize highball. The girls were content sucking air through bee-stung lips. “It just so happens I can more than most,” she continued. “Unfortunately, that means I’m usually a slave to my cell phone, even when I’m at a party.”

  She took a sip from the martini glass, noticing that a good portion of the nearby tuxedo- and designer dress–wearing crowd was watching her—some out of the corners of their eyes, some outright, over the shoulders of their dates or from where they were seated at the smattering of round hors d’oeuvre stations.

  Jendari enjoyed the attention. When she’d strolled down Central Park West in the waning daylight hours before the gala began, in her Versace and pearls, the tourists in shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers had stared because they didn’t know who such an elegantly dressed, handsome woman could be; here, the wealthy one percent of the one percent stared because they did.

  Most of the faces, Jendari recognized. There was Arthur Lemmon, the timber magnate. Hansel Gelter, whose consulting firm worked with nearly every big bank on Wall Street. Francis Lopeman, whose hedge fund had just narrowly survived an SEC witch hunt, with most of its eight billion dollars in assets intact. Jerry Grossberg, Alex Feinstein, and Dormac Cooper, the CEOs of the three biggest insurance giants in the country. And then, of course, the men whose names were their introductions: two Rockefellers, a pair of Bloombergs, a gaggle of Guggenheims, three Kennedys, a handful of Rothschilds, and at least one Trump.