Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  Almost all of the invitees were couples, captained by a tuxedoed man; Jendari counted an even distribution of first wives, second wives, mistresses, and expensive accessories. Years ago, Jendari had stopped inviting a date of her own. Not because she’d ever had any trouble finding an appropriate consort, but because what she had told Agastine was true. Her business was a constant pull, especially as of late.

  She wasn’t the wealthiest person in the room, or the only billionaire. But she believed her empire was unique in its scope—and had become even more unique over the past few years. Unique in a way that will one day affect every single person in this room—and all of the tourists on the streets of this city and all the other cities around the world.

  A man on her arm would only have gotten in the way. And besides, no man, no matter how pretty, could compete with the dazzle of the Swarovski crystals on her clutch, or the pearls resting on her décolletage.

  “Maybe you need a partner,” Agastine tried, oblivious to the chunk of pineapple that had now lodged itself in one of his dentures. “Someone who could put a diamond on that lovely hand, big enough to make you forget about your cell phone for an evening.”

  Jendari looked at the two Ukrainians and tried to hide the distaste from her voice. “Unfortunately, I think I’m a few decades too late to join your traveling band, Mr. Agastine. Not that I don’t appreciate the offer.”

  She knew that Agastine was at least a billion dollars richer than she, but she doubted he could give her anything she didn’t already possess, except maybe some exotic venereal disease. Certainly she had enough diamonds. In fact, even tonight, despite the pearls, she was wearing one on a platinum chain, hanging down the center of her back. More than sixteen carats, a strange, smoky yellow color—and completely hidden from view. She’d worn it every year to the charity gala, and not just because she liked the way it felt against the hot, naked skin above her spine.

  “I’d certainly make an exception,” Agastine started, but he was interrupted as a short, stocky man with thinning hair the same color as his ill-fitting gray suit sidled up next to one of the Ukrainians, and bowed slightly in Jendari’s direction.

  “Excuse me, monsieur, madames—Ms. Saphra, if I could borrow you for a moment?”

  Jendari felt no small sense of relief to see the stocky man in gray. Agastine, for his part, did not conceal his disgust at the poorly dressed interloper; the tiny metal pin affixed to the lapel of the man’s suit, identifying him as a museum employee, only made the indignity of the interruption that much worse. Agastine gave the man a look, then put an arm around each of his Ukrainian girls’ waists, and steered them toward the ice-buffet at the head of the room. When he was out of earshot, Jendari exhaled, depositing her drink onto the tray of a passing waiter.

  “That’s an image that’s going to make me pray for early onset Alzheimer’s, Mr. Grange.”

  Grange took her by the hand and began leading her through the crowd of tuxedos, toward an unmarked door beneath the dorsal fin of the hanging blue whale.

  “In a moment, I’m going to show you something that will make you forget all about them.”

  Jendari felt the excitement rising as she let the stocky man pull her along, nodding at the guests she recognized as they ploughed forward, thankfully too fast to hear anything but the most cursory congratulations on the fabulousness of the party. She knew it looked strange, her being pulled along like a toddler in a tantrum by the only man in the room who wasn’t wearing a tux. But she had known Henry Grange a very long time, and he wasn’t the type to get this excited unnecessarily.

  He reached the door, flashed a magnetic ID card against the plate by the doorframe, and then led her into an auxiliary hallway. The hallway was gloriously quiet, the noise from the gala swallowed up by the thick carpet beneath Jendari’s red-soled Louboutins and the wood-paneled walls.

  Grange didn’t say a word as he continued to pull her forward. There were very few men Jendari would have let lead her along like this; but she had known Grange more than a decade, and she had never seen him this excited—which meant whatever he was about to show her was certainly going to overshadow the gala in the Hall of Ocean Life.

  Two turns later, a near sprint through a pair of identical corridors, and they went through another locked door into a dimly lit exhibit hall that Jendari immediately recognized. To be fair, it would have been hard to miss the sixty-three-foot-long Indian canoe hanging from the ceiling. The canoe dated back to the nineteenth century, and had been carved from a single cedar tree. Covered in detailed aboriginal artwork, it was perhaps the most famous example of Northwest Coast Indian art, and along with the blue whale, was one of the museum’s most iconic displays. During daytime hours, the room would have been so full of civilians gawking at the intricate woodwork, it would have been impossible to stroll at any pace more than a shuffle through the rectangular hall, let alone at a jog.

  At the moment, Jendari would have happily used the canoe for kindling, if burning the damn thing would have gotten Grange to explain why he was dragging her through the desolate museum on high heels and at full speed in the middle of the night.

  “Just a little farther, Ms. Saphra. I promise it will be worth it.”

  They were at a near sprint again, gliding past the canoe and out through the back of the exhibit, and into the Hall of Human Origins. Jendari felt her interest perk up as they moved past the three skeletons at the front of the hall—representing seven million years of human evolution, from apelike ancestors to modern Homo erectus. Jendari had spent many hundreds of hours wandering through this exhibit, which linked modern DNA research with fossil discoveries—tracing mankind through bones and chemistry back to where it all began.

  She nearly pulled Grange to a stop as they sped past Peking Man, the partial skull discovered in China in the early 1930s that had allowed scientists to recreate the face of one of the earliest known examples of Homo erectus from more than four hundred thousand years ago. But Grange didn’t let her pause, even as they moved from Peking Man to Lucy, the most complete skeleton of an early hominid, dating back a staggering four million years. Jendari had always felt it was fitting that the oldest skeleton of early mankind was actually the interior of a woman. Although Mitochondrial Eve—the mother of modern humanity, whose DNA lived inside each and every living person on earth—wouldn’t exist until many millions years after the primitive Lucy, Jendari liked to think that some of Lucy’s features would have carried over into the first woman, and through her, to every woman who has lived since.

  But at the moment, there was no time to dwell on Lucy or Eve; Grange was moving them forward even faster as they burst from the Hall of Human Origins and bisected the circular Hall of Meteorites, dominated by the massive Cape York Meteorite, the thirty-four ton, mostly nickel piece of an asteroid so heavy that the steel support structure beneath the space rock plunged directly into the bedrock beneath the museum itself. And then they were in the Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems.

  Jendari absentmindedly fingered the pearls on her chest as Grange slowed his pace, leading her past the glass display cases teeming with brightly colored baubles from all over the world. There was a time when Jendari had been obsessed by jewels like those around her now. In her early teens, after the death of her father had left her a millionaire and the largest stockholder in one of the Middle East’s most profitable telecom companies, she had spent months aimlessly trotting the globe, buying everything and anything that turned her fancy. Even now, the dressing rooms of her various homes were cluttered with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings that would have seemed appropriate in this exhibit; maybe nothing as grand as the Star of India, the prize possession of the Hall, standing in its own room, at five hundred and sixty-three carats, the largest blue star sapphire in the world, or the Patricia Emerald, the twelve-sided, six-hundred-and-thirty-two carat gemstone—but certainly she had one of the most expensive private collections of any of her teenage peers. It wasn’t until her great-aunt, Mile
na Saphra, took her father’s place—not just at the head of the company but as her mentor, her mother figure, her guiding influence—that she’d realized the insignificance of such gaudy material possessions.

  Since that moment, more than forty years ago, Jendari had learned that possessions, like philanthropy, needed a purpose; they had to be useful. It was the purpose, the significance, that made a thing truly beautiful.

  They were both breathing hard as Grange led her the last few steps past the Star of India, deep into the farthest reaches of the Hall of Gems. To Jendari, the most famous sapphire in the world was like a third presence in the room. The perfect dome-shaped gemstone, with its glowing six-pointed star created by the light bouncing off the crystal at its heart, wasn’t beautiful simply because it was rare, or famous, or large. It was beautiful because it had a soul, a history.

  Formed millions of years ago by natural forces, discovered almost four centuries ago in a riverbed in Sri Lanka, and donated to the American Museum by the banker J. P. Morgan, the Star had been a mainstay of the museum from its beginning. But as spectacular as it was, the Star of India’s journey hadn’t ended in the display room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  In 1964, the Star had been the centerpiece of a bizarre crime. A pair of beatnik beach bums, inspired by a Hollywood movie about jewel thieves, snuck through a bathroom window into the museum and stole two dozen irreplaceable gems, including the Star and the famous sixteen-carat Eagle Diamond, a rough, uncut gem found near the town of Eagle, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s.

  Although the hapless thieves were quickly apprehended, the brazen theft would go down in history as one of the most audacious jewel heists ever conducted. After the Star of India was recovered from a locker in the Miami bus station, it attracted even larger crowds because of its infamy. The Eagle Diamond hadn’t been so fortunate; to this day, its whereabouts remained a mystery, and most experts believed the rough mineral had been chopped up and sold off in pieces.

  To Jendari, though the robbery had been primitive to the point of being comical, the disappearance and return of the Star had given it significance; it was a reminder of how quickly something that seemed so permanent could vanish, and how even a small-minded person could accomplish something well beyond his status, given the right opportunity.

  But if Grange considered the Star of India anything beyond another gem in the museum’s collection, he wasn’t showing. In two seconds flat, he had passed the glowing gem and hurriedly unlocked another unmarked door. A moment later, they were both descending down a narrow stairway.

  The stairs ended in front of a steel door. Instead of a wave of his magnetic ID card, this time Grange punched a series of numbers into an electronic keypad attached to the door’s frame. There was a loud metallic click, and the door swung inward on automatic hinges.

  Jendari found herself being led into a small, steel-walled chamber, almost devoid of furniture. In the middle of the room stood a single wooden crate about three feet tall, nearly as wide as it was long.

  She realized immediately where they were. Grange had brought her to one of the numerous archival examination rooms set aside for receiving and documenting the literally millions of fossils, artifacts, and gemstones that arrived into the museum every year, from private collectors, archaeologists, other museums, and even foreign governments. The truth was, the vast majority of items that came through the museum never saw the light of a display cabinet. One could spend a lifetime crawling through the bowels of the museum, and still only see a fraction of what had been collected over the years.

  Grange stood in silence as Jendari let the steel door seal shut behind them.

  “I know you like to tease, Mr. Grange, but it’s not good to keep a lady waiting. Especially this lady.”

  Grange grinned, trickles of sweat framing his cubic features. As one of the American Museum’s most senior curators of antiquities, Henry Grange was an expert on many things—but pleasing women was likely not in his repertoire. Thankfully, Jendari hadn’t spent the last decade funneling money into a private Swiss bank account she had set up for the curator because of his sexual prowess. To Jendari, the mysterious crate standing in the middle of this steel chamber was more exciting than anything any man could do for her.

  “As you wish,” Grange said.

  With that, he nearly dove across the room, retrieving a heavy iron crowbar from behind the crate. He went to work on the wood, leveraging his considerable weight against the oversize steel nails that held the crate together.

  “You can’t imagine the difficulty we had in getting this here,” Grange said as he struggled with the crowbar. “The paperwork involved in getting the permission to use the submersible in the first place was staggering. Then there were the payouts to the customs officers in Alexandria, at the stopover in Paris, and then again at JFK.”

  There was a loud crack as one of the wooden slats split down the middle. Grange jammed the crowbar into the opening and then twisted with both shoulders. The entire top of the crate cracked free, then clattered to the floor.

  Jendari thought she caught a whiff of salt water, though it might have just been her imagination. She knew the items in the crate had been on quite a journey since they’d been pulled out of the cavern dug into the floor of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor—halfway between the isthmus where the Egyptian city had been built and the ruins of Pharos, a tiny, ancient island, sitting right where the Nile River drained into the Mediterranean Sea. The amount of bribes that she had funded to enable Grange’s team to conduct the archaeological survey beneath the ruins of what was once known as one of the Ancient Seven Wonders of the World, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, were too numerous to count; when you added in the expense of all the red tape to get the artifacts Grange had found out of Egypt and onto American soil, it was well into the millions. But even so, Jendari had no regrets. When Grange had first informed her of the discovery of the cavern, she had been willing to pay far more to get her hands on what might be inside.

  Her chest rising beneath her strings of pearls, Jendari crossed the room as Grange knelt by the open crate. She watched as he carefully lifted out two heavy objects, wrapped in plastic bubble wrap. He placed the objects side by side on the floor, then gently unrolled the wrap around the closest of the two.

  Jendari gasped audibly as he pulled the statue free. It was two feet high, chiseled from what looked like polished limestone. A female warrior, holding an ivory javelin. Her right breast was missing, and there was a necklace of what appeared to be eggs hanging down around her shoulders.

  From an archaeological perspective, it was an incredible discovery. The Lighthouse of Alexandria had been built in the third century BC, supposedly to honor Alexander the Great, who had died at age thirty-two. His successor, Ptolemy I, began construction shortly after Alexander’s death, but it was his son, Ptolemy II, who had finished what the father had started: a magnificent lighthouse, four hundred and fifty feet tall, with a furnace at its peak that rotated three hundred sixty degrees, and could be seen as far away as twenty-nine miles. It was the model for all future lighthouses—all the way until the present day.

  Although it was widely accepted that the lighthouse was a Greek construction, Jendari’s own sources had led her to believe that Alexander’s death was only one of the impetuses for the construction of the Wonder. A previously funded excursion to the island of Pharos had revealed a single stone inscription that had spoken of a much earlier temple at the location where the lighthouse had been built—one with a much older history. But until now, her only proof had been those etchings on stone.

  Now she and Grange were looking at something much more concrete. Although Jendari had many similar statues in her private collection—most supplied by Grange and his teams over the past decade—she was certain that the statue in front of her outdated them all. It was, perhaps, the earliest representation of an Amazon anyone had ever found.

  But the look on Grange’s face told her that the statue was only t
he appetizer. With trembling hands, the stocky man reached forward and unrolled the wrapping from the second object.

  Jendari’s eyes widened and she immediately pushed Grange aside and dropped to her knees in his place. In front of her, flush with the floor, was a solid stone tablet, covered in ancient cuneiform. She knew from her studies of the last decade that the cuneiform was Sumerian. The age of the object in front of her had to be over eight thousand years: many millennia before the construction of the ruined lighthouse beneath which the table had been found. But it wasn’t the Sumerian writing, or even the age of the stone, that sent spikes of adrenaline through Jendari’s veins.

  It was the single image in the center of the tablet. Vivid, indelible, and immediately recognizable:

  “Two intertwined snakes,” Grange whispered. “The double helix.”

  Jendari nodded.

  “Somewhere near where your team uncovered this, there was a painting on the wall of the cavern.”

  It wasn’t a question. Grange stared at her.

  “Yes.”

  “A tribe of women warriors, leaving a jungle, carrying a stone.”

  “But—how could you know?”

  Jendari didn’t respond. Her head was swirling. The stone in front of her, the image in the center, of the two intertwined snakes, was more important than anything in Jendari’s private collection. Hell, it’s more important, more significant, than anything in the entire museum.

  “Crate them both back up, and have them delivered to my plane immediately.”