Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  “Spiders,” Jack said.

  Brazilian whiteknee tarantulas—Jack could instantly recognize them from their size, and from the bands of white across their long, pointed legs. He’d seen a few before, in previous visits to the rainforest, but never anything like this. There were thousands of them, covering nearly every inch of the cavern, and as he watched through the orange light of the flare, he saw hundreds more bubbling up through holes in the granite floor, climbing over each other until the entire floor was ankle deep.

  And then Jack felt something touch his shoulder. He looked to his left and saw a tarantula clinging to his jacket. He swiped it away with the flare, sending it spinning toward the surging floor. Then something whizzed by his face, missing him by inches. He looked up and saw them dropping from the canopy, dozens of them, like a squirming rain.

  Jack leaped back into the cockpit, slamming what was left of the door behind him. He was breathing hard, trying to think. Brazilian whiteknees weren’t particularly poisonous, but they were damn big, with ridiculously large fangs. The puncture size of one whiteknee bite could cause serious problems. A thousand bites? Jack didn’t want to find out.

  He felt a sting against his wrist and nearly shrieked—and realized it was just a spark from the now dying flare. Watching the flame as it shrank to a bare, dull glow, he had a sudden, crazy, stupid thought.

  He let the flare die and then leaped forward, grabbing the stone tablet and leather flight diary, tucking both objects into his jacket. Then he climbed on top of what was left of the pilot’s chair and pressed his hands against the cockpit roof.

  The rusted metal gave way on the second push. He used the metal as a shield against the spiders still raining from the ceiling and climbed up out onto the top of the plane. His first step went right through—his boot disappearing for a perilous moment before he yanked it back up—but then the roof held as he carefully stepped forward, kicking spiders out of the way as he went.

  He focused his attention on the airplane’s tail, extended about fifteen feet in front of him. Then he looked past the tip of the tail, into the hanging vines and twisted tree limbs. It was going to be close—but he didn’t see another choice.

  Still holding the metal above his head, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a third flare. He yanked the cord with his teeth and watched as the flame spit upward, again filling the cavern with orange light. Then he leaned a few inches over the side of the airplane, looking at the cavern floor.

  The spiders were knee deep now, a churning carpet of fur, legs, and fangs. Hundreds were now working their way up the side of the plane, toward Jack’s feet.

  Now or never.

  He searched the floor for a spot where the spiders were packed a little less deep—where he could see glimpses of floor, and the dark stain against the granite. Then he took aim and tossed the lit flare at the spot.

  By the time it hit, he was already running forward at full speed. He heard the dried fuel ignite just as his boots hit the tail and then he was hurling himself upward, buoyed by the blast beneath him, his arms outstretched. He caught the bottom of the vegetation with his fingers, one hand grasping a stretch of vine, the other a rough twist of bark. And then he was lifting himself upward with all of his strength.

  The heat hit him just as he was clawing through the first level of the canopy, a burst so hot he feared his jeans were going to go up in flames. There was a strange screeching sound—a thousand spiders burning simultaneously—and then, just as suddenly, the heat started to dissipate as the layer of fuel burned off and the thick humidity controlled the conflagration.

  By the time Jack had reached the top of the canopy, delicately balancing himself against limbs that seemed big enough to support him, all he saw beneath him were wisps of dark smoke, working through gaps in the green.

  He took a moment to make sure the stone tablet and the leather flight diary were still against his body, and then he began to make his way to the edge of the canopy and the short five-foot free climb up the cliff to where his rope was waiting. As difficult a climb as that would be, Jack knew that it was only the beginning. The stone tablet—and the strange pictogram next to the head of the snake—had told him exactly where he needed to go next.

  In his mind, he was already on his way there: far above the canopy of green and the burning remains of the twin propeller plane.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jack was fighting a battle against gravity. Hand over hand, fingers clenched white against the soapstone, he was nearly blind in the pitch black darkness, wind ripping like talons across his back, tearing at his jacket, threatening to pull him away from the statue and toss him, spinning like a rag doll, toward the city a half mile below. The rope tied tight around his waist dangled like a tail that was now limp and useless, leading back into the narrow access tunnel twelve feet below, halfway up the Wonder’s chest. If he fell, the rope would catch him; but he was not at all certain that his grapple would hold against the floor of the tunnel that had let out to the exterior of the monument. Still, there hadn’t been anywhere else to place it—unless he had been willing to dig the claws right into the soapstone exterior itself, and he was pretty sure he’d committed enough blasphemic acts already, without digging a grapple into Christ the Redeemer’s flesh.

  Getting inside the statue had actually been easier than Jack had expected. By the time he’d made the arduous climb back up Corcovado and scaled the wall in front of the light panel up to the viewing platform, it had been well after dark; the tourists and worshippers and wedding parties had been sent home. Andy had stayed behind, hiding in the brush right where Jack had first made his descent; but after Jack had handed him the stone tablet and the leather flight manual, he had eventually gone as well, accompanying Dashia back to their hotel. This was something Jack had to do on his own.

  Now a hundred feet up, so high the lights of the city were like Techni-colored pinpoints, Jack clenched his jaw against the wind and worked one leg over the statue’s collarbone, one hand beneath the bearded chin. Jack’s biceps cried out as he pulled himself the last few feet, placing his body flush with the iconic face. Though most of Christ’s features had been blasted away by the elements over the past near century, Jack had no trouble recognizing the symbol from the pictogram. The nose, lips, eyebrows, and ears were mostly gone, but the long hair, the beard, the high cheekbones—Jack believed the image in front of him was built to last a thousand years, not just a hundred.

  It hadn’t taken him long to decipher the pictogram. He’d considered waiting until he’d time to digest what he’d found, to try and understand how a version of the stone tablet, which he had seen depicted beneath the Temple of Artemis had ended up in a crate beneath Christ the Redeemer—but he’d quickly realized that the late hour, and the fact that he was already on site, were opportunities he couldn’t pass up.

  Before he’d begun his own trek down the tourist-friendly side of the mountain, Andy had helped Jack find the access panel to the interior of the hollow statue, a small door directly above a corner of the black granite pedestal, carved into Christ’s right heel. Although there hadn’t been any security guards on the viewing platform, they could hear Portuguese drifting up from nearby the escalators; they decided against taking the time to break into the chapel to find a ladder and had instead used a combination of Andy’s shoulders and a judicial toss of the grappling hook over a crook in the black granite to hoist Jack up the twenty-five feet between the platform and the heel.

  It hadn’t been hard to pry the door open with his iták. Andy was gone before Jack shut the door behind him, leaving him alone in the vast interior of the Wonder, staring up at the huge framework of concrete and reinforced iron that held the separate pieces of the great statue in place. Jack knew the construct had been refurbished a number of times since it had been delivered by the French engineers in the late 1920s; at some point, thankfully, the workers had added a metal staircase leading up the interior to about Christ’s chest level, maybe seventy-f
ive feet above.

  Jack had taken the stairs fast, careful not to make too much noise as he went. The stairs ended in what first appeared to be a sheer wall of soapstone and concrete; but as Jack got closer, he saw the seams to another small door, which led into a tight, narrow tunnel, three feet tall and barely as wide. Down on his hands and knees, he’d crawled the last few yards to another opening—and leaned out into blackness, the wind nearly pushing him back onto his heels.

  Jack knew he wasn’t the first person to climb outside the access tunnel and make his way up to the shoulders of Christ. In December 1999, an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner had leaped off the right arm of the statue wearing a low-altitude parachute, breaking the world record for the lowest BASE jump. And in 2010, vandals had used scaffolding that had been put up to repair some of the exteriors of the statue to ascend to the head and spray graffiti all over Christ’s face.

  But he was fairly certain he was the first person to scale the statue for a single, simple purpose: to look Christ right in the eye.

  Holding tight to the bearded chin, Jack used his knees to lift himself until he was standing almost straight; his face came to about the statue’s wind-damaged nose. He realized he was going to have to work a little harder, climb a little farther up the Wonder’s twelve-foot tall head. With a burst of strength, he pulled himself up with the fingers of his right hand, until he was hanging from a groove where an eyebrow used to be.

  Right in front of him was the statue’s left eye, about the size of a small manhole cover. Up close, it seemed as smooth as the rest of the statue, a glade of soapstone on a concrete base. But Jack was certain there was something hidden behind that blank stare.

  He got his iták free from the holster along his back and carefully ran the edge around the eye. It took a good minute before he felt the groove, right up where the iris would have been, had the statue been real. It was almost imperceptible, covered in a brush of soapstone, but once the iták dug through the outer layer, Jack was able to get a centimeter of the blade into the seam. Using his free hand, he twisted the iták—and a small section of the soapstone came loose on nearly microscopic hinges, about the size of a package of cigarettes, revealing a hollow cubbyhole.

  Oblivious to the wind and the ache in his fingers where he gripped the statue, Jack reholstered the iták and jammed his free hand into the cubby. About a foot in, his palm touched what felt like parchment, wrapped around something small and solid. He pulled the item free, closing the soapstone cover behind it. Then he lowered himself back below the statue’s chin and onto the shoulder. Straddling the vast deltoid with his legs, he unwrapped the parchment and lifted the object free.

  Heavy, though it fit in the palm of his hand, plated in bronze that shone even in the near darkness, crafted with sophisticated precision, down to the carved, beady eyes and the hint of a forked tongue, the snake-head—the first segment from the stone tablet that Andy had taken back to the Rio hotel—was staggeringly beautiful. In all his expeditions, Jack had never seen anything quite like it. And then he carefully turned the segment over and saw something that shocked him even further. The segment was filled with mechanical bronze gears.

  Jack’s mind whirled. Just looking at the segment, he couldn’t tell how old it was; but something about the artistry on the exterior of the object, the thin grooves that Jack recognized as having been made by bronze and stone tools, he had a suspicion that the thing was extremely old indeed. Certainly, if the ditched plane beneath the overgrown canopy of vegetation told him anything, it was that the segment had been placed in the statue nearly a century ago, maybe even before the Wonder of the World was finished being built. But the craftsmanship of the snake’s head made him think in millennia, not centuries.

  Certainly, there was plenty of evidence that complicated mechanical gear-work had existed for at least two thousand years. The famous Antikythera mechanism—gears designed to make astronomical calculations—had been found in a Greek shipwreck back in the early 1900s, and dated back to at least 100 BC. The Bronze Age itself, beginning 3300 BC, was defined by humankind’s discovery of the processes of mining and smelting copper which, when combined with the alloy tin, could be made into bronze weapons, armor, and tools. There was plenty of evidence that certain Bronze Age civilizations had taken metallurgy further than that.

  Even so, the snake segment’s gear-work looked extremely complex; Jack had no idea what it was for, or what it could do. He realized he wasn’t going to figure the mystery out there, hanging from the shoulder of Christ the Redeemer.

  He began to rewrap the segment in the parchment when a stiff wind whipped across the statue’s vast chest, nearly pulling the papery material out of his grip. He caught it just before it blew off into oblivion and noticed, with a start, that the backside of the parchment wasn’t blank like the front.

  Imprinted across the papery substance was the same symbol of the segmented snake from the stone tablet. Except this time, there was a new pictogram, flush with the second segment—one down from the snake’s head:

  The picture was strange, and at first Jack didn’t recognize the symbol: a humanoid figure, half-man, half-woman, holding what appeared to be a sharply pointed trident. Jack immediately began to sift through his memory banks, guided by the familiar ancient weapon, trying to figure out which Greek or Roman god might fit the iconography. And then it dawned on him.

  He was off by three thousand miles, and more than two thousand years.

  He began carefully rolling the segment back into the parchment, and was placing both into his jacket when a brilliant blue light exploded around him, briefly blinding him. For a moment, despite his scientific background, his thoughts raced to the supernatural—that he’d inadvertently triggered the rapture, and considering where he was at that moment, he was pretty sure he wasn’t heading anywhere good.

  But then the blue shifted to purple, and then burgundy red. Jack squinted down past his feet and saw the banks of LEDs bursting to life along the top of the statue’s granite base. The light show had begun.

  Rapture or not, it was time for Jack to get out of there, before someone noticed him hanging a few feet below Christ’s head. He began the climb back down the chest of the great Wonder, his thoughts still captivated by the bronze snake’s head wrapped in parchment, and the strange new pictogram.

  Half man, half woman, with a trident in its hand.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The image was still fresh in Jack’s mind as he leaped up the last flight of stairs leading to his team’s hotel room, on the second floor of a flamingo-pink building at the end of a cobbled alley. The neon light from the disco across the street was even visible here, in a cinderblock stairwell with inch-wide slits instead of windows; garish orange and red and blue, flashing across his face as he reached for the doorknob.

  He was already talking as he threw open the door, reaching into his jacket to retrieve the parchment and the snake-head.

  “Get ready to have your minds blown,” he started—and then he froze, the two items still hidden beneath his arm.

  The hotel room was Spartan and compact; a dresser by the door, with a black-and-white television set. A pair of double beds by the window. And a little two-seater couch in front of a knee-high coffee table. Andy was sitting on one of the beds, a little plastic specimen container in his hands. Dashia was on the other bed, her laptop open on the pillow in front of her. But Jack’s attention was immediately drawn to the couch.

  “And who the hell are you?” he asked. He hadn’t meant it to come out like that, but after the events of the past two days, he was beginning to run low on tolerance for surprises. And certainly, the woman was a surprise. Angular face, with a nose a little too small to be perfect but not unpleasant; cheekbones that could have rivaled the statue he had just climbed down; long reddish-brown hair held back behind her ears, and gray-blue eyes. She was wearing a suit, which was strange, considering that it was Rio and well after midnight. And she had the leather flight diary that Jack
had taken from the plane open on her lap.

  “Relax, Doc,” Andy said. “She’s not here to repossess your car, although that was my first guess when she showed up at the door. She’s a Doc, like you. Although she’s a real scientist.”

  The woman attempted a smile, but it was obvious she wasn’t used to the gesture.

  “Botanical geneticist, actually. Michigan State. Sloane Costa. I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but my flight got in a couple hours ago, and I was hoping you might be up.”

  Jack didn’t move, his hand still cupping the parchment-wrapped snake-head.

  “Do I know you?”

  She shook her head, her hair barely moving with the motion.

  “Although I’m a recent fan of your work. I’ve been reading your papers nonstop for the past twenty-four hours. In particular, your work on the mythological Amazonian culture intrigues me—well, enough that I tracked you down through your department head at Princeton and caught the earliest flight I could find to Brazil.”

  Normally, Jack would have been happy to shoot the breeze with a fellow scientist, but he had much more important work to do. Then his gaze went again to the leather-bound flight diary, and he felt a tinge of possessiveness.

  “Do you have any idea what I went through to get that?”

  “It’s pretty amazing,” Sloane said. “I mean, I’m sure it’s some sort of hoax—it has to be some sort of hoax. But I think I’ve figured out what it’s meant to make us believe. I think I know whose flight diary this is supposed to have been.”

  Jack was barely listening to her. He wanted to grab the leather diary off of her lap and toss her out into the alley.

  “Dr. Costa, I’m sure whatever you came here for is important, but we’re kind of in the middle of something.”

  Sloane looked at him for a full beat.

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something too, Dr. Grady. I came here directly from Rome. The Colosseum, actually. Because I found something strange.”