Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  Andy held up the plastic specimen container. Jack could see a fleck of something inside.

  “It’s a paint chip,” Andy said. “Dr. Costa says it was made from a pressed vine.”

  “A very unique vine,” Sloane chimed in. “Of which I’ve also collected a very unique seed. That’s how I found you.”

  “You found me because of a vine?”

  “A very old vine. Dating back to the Bronze Age, to my surprise. After I left the Colosseum, I did some research. Turns out this particular red vine has been mentioned exactly three times in historical documents. A travelogue by the Greek historian Herodotus describing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; a war record by an aide to Alexander the Great, describing the conquest of a small village defended by a tribe of women warriors; and a poem by a papal scholar from the first days of the Vatican, about a cult of female warriors he called the Order of Eve.”

  Jack blinked. The woman was watching him carefully now, and he found the experience a bit intimidating. She was sharp, that was for sure—but there was something a little terrifying about her stiffness, the way she perched on the edge of the couch, her fingers clasped above the open-flight diary.

  “You can see how I got to you,” she continued. “At least two of those documents had some relationship to mythical stories about the Amazons. And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon might very well have implied a connection as well. From what I understand, as the legend goes, King Nebuchadnezzar II built them to please his homesick wife—a former female warrior captured by the Babylonians.”

  Jack nodded. He wasn’t sure he liked the way she was bandying about the term “mythical” with each mention of the civilization he had dedicated the past few years to studying. But he couldn’t fault the logic that had led her to him. Still, it seemed a little crazy, traveling all that way because of a paint chip.

  “That’s all pretty fascinating,” Jack started. “But I’m not sure how I can help. I don’t know the first thing about vines—”

  “Actually, the vine isn’t the reason I’m here, Dr. Grady.”

  And then she unclasped her fingers and pointed with a short, unmanicured nail.

  Sitting on the coffee table in front of her knees was a shiny bronze snake segment, filled with mechanical gears.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The blade was incredibly sharp—a near microscopic sliver of titanium, mounted with fragments of pure obsidian, fractured down to the width of a single molecule. So sharp, in fact, that Jendari Saphra couldn’t pinpoint the moment when it flicked across the palm of her hand.

  It took less than an eighth of a second for the blade to remove the half-dozen skin cells the DNA lock needed to run the protein scan—and only twice as long again before the bright red light above the vault door blinked green, indicating that Jendari’s DNA matched with the retina scan she’d already endured on the way into the mahogany-lined anteroom.

  She took her hand off the scanning pad and instinctively brushed it against her pressed silk slacks. Of course, the scan had been completely painless. Jendari, who’d minored in electrical engineering at Yale nearly forty years ago and had endowed assistant professorships in biogenetics at no less than four Ivy League schools since then, had overseen the development process of the DNA scanner herself, and the device was considered one of the most reliable state-of-the-art security systems on the market. Electronic codes could be broken. Fingerprints could be faked. Even retinas could be counterfeited. But living DNA, literally the essence of life itself, was a pure and perfect signature.

  In fact, over the past twenty-five years, Jendari had built an entire empire around the exploitation of those microscopic twists of DNA. The scanner was just one of a hundred such advances that had come out of Saphra Industries’ dozen genetics-focused laboratories spread across Europe and Southeast Asia—everything from at-home tests for various diseases, to instant paternity assays, to prenatal scanners, to security identification platforms now used by the majority of commercial banks and government offices in the developed world. In the past year, even the Pentagon had installed a number of the DNA scanners, replacing outdated infrared readers that had a tendency to malfunction when the lower-floors’ air-conditioning systems went out. Jendari had no idea how much the military contract had been worth to her company’s bottom line; she’d long ago stopped thinking of her business in terms as petty and imperfect as revenue and profits. After the first billion, money lost its significance. There were much more palpable measures of continued success.

  Jendari listened as the electronic locks that circumnavigated the vault’s circular, reinforced titanium door began to click off, one by one. At around the halfway point, her attention was interrupted by a voice breaking out of an intercom panel on the ceiling above her head.

  “Ms. Saphra, we’re beginning our descent to ten thousand feet, in preparation for landing. We should be on the ground in less than twenty minutes.”

  Jendari felt the floor beneath her feet dip slightly, but she didn’t reach for any of the polished chrome handles embedded in the leather-padded walls. As usual there was almost no turbulence. She’d had the Boeing 767 fitted with the most modern available dampeners—not because she was bothered by something as trivial as turbulence, but because lately, she’d spent more time on the plane than she had in any of her homes.

  The 767 was almost as comfortable as many of them; she’d customized the thing with two bedrooms, three marble bathrooms, a small gym, and of course her traveling office, which was really more of a command center, outfitted with an electronic communication system that rivaled any of the airborne facilities she’d ever seen, except maybe the array on Air Force One.

  Then again, she was quite certain that Air Force One did not have a built-in vault.

  A soft buzz echoed through the anteroom as the final set of electronic locks disengaged. Slowly, the door swung inward on ultra-smooth magnetic hinges. The door was eight inches thick, both bulletproof and bombproof. Similarly, this entire section of the Boeing 767 had been crafted out of the nearly impervious material, and was designed to separate from the rest of the fuselage in the event of a crash. Of course, Jendari didn’t expect to survive a thirty-thousand-foot plummet by sealing herself in a titanium can. But the vault wasn’t a panic room; it hadn’t been designed to keep her intact.

  She stepped through the open doorway into complete blackness, shivering slightly as the cool air splashed against her cheeks. The windowless vault was kept at a brisk forty-three degrees Fahrenheit at all times. Likewise, twin dehumidifiers built into the self-enclosed ventilation system scrubbed most of the moisture from the air. The combined effect often made Jendari feel like she was stepping out of one of the most expensive private airplanes in the world and into some sort of ancient desert tomb.

  As the door sealed shut behind her and the lights automatically rose to a level slightly dimmer than twilight, the shapes that appeared around her only added to the feeling. From free-standing stone, bronze, and ivory statues that rose up from the titanium floor to the hermetically sealed Plexiglas shelves filled with smaller items—gold coins, stone tablets, ancient carvings, bronze devices—that lined the walls, it was a setting that rivaled any museum exhibit dedicated to ancient cultures in the world. But from the moment she stepped deeper into the vault, her eyes trained on the ceiling, she knew she was in a place far beyond the reach of any museum curator’s most frenzied dreams.

  She didn’t stop moving until she was directly under the great bronze wheel, which was suspended from the curved ceiling on an articulated, pneumatic arm. With the press of a button hidden next to a nearby shelf, she could lower the six-hundred-pound wheel almost to the floor; but for the moment, she was content to stand in silence beneath the polished bronze, marveling at the sophistication of its design.

  To describe it as a wheel wasn’t entirely accurate, though Jendari struggled to find a better word. The object was a perfect circle, and indeed, carved directly into its face were exactly ten thousand p
erfectly symmetrical spokes. Though impossible to see from that distance, especially in the dim light of the vault, Jendari knew that between the spokes were hundreds of thousands of pictograms—some as small as a pin’s head, others the size of a finger or a thumb—that would take many, many lifetimes to completely decipher. Twice a week for nearly a decade, Henry Grange and his most trusted archaeological colleagues had been meticulously working their way from spoke to spoke, cataloging the pictograms, and in all that time, they had barely made it through five degrees of the wheel. Even so, what they had deciphered was nothing short of spectacular.

  According to Grange and his scientists, the pictograms—a favorite early linguistic tool of many ancient human cultures, from hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa, the Americas, and Asia to early Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and even Romans—were aligned in a rudimentary chronology, dating far back into the early Bronze Age, nearly eight thousand years ago. Though it was impossible to corroborate any of the details or events that were being chronicled—recorded history didn’t go back anywhere near that far—the pictograms seemed to be charting the history of one particular civilization, from its inception in what appeared to be an idyllic garden, through various nomadic travels throughout the known world of the time period, via ship, foot, and carriage, on into a stationary culture, through the development of towns and even cities. Along the way, there were images of wars, natural tragedies, and technological developments—everything from primitive timekeepers and astronomy aids to irrigation aqueducts.

  Grange’s team had filled hundreds of notebooks, interpreting the tiny percent of the wheel they had gone through; stacked along one shelf on the far wall of the vault, the notebooks represented less than the first three centuries charted by the pictograms on the wheel. Jendari could only imagine how many books it would take to describe the civilization’s history encompassed in all ten thousand spokes.

  The detailed face of the wheel itself and the pictograms between the spokes would have been a find worthy of an entire museum, let alone any self-respecting billionaire’s private vault. But the pictograms were not the most impressive feature of the wheel suspended above Jendari’s head. The object’s most impressive feature was something that she couldn’t even see.

  Jendari shivered again, though this time it had nothing to do with the temperature in the vault. Staring up at the huge circle of bronze, so many years since she’d gazed upon it for the first time, she could still hardly believe what she knew to be true. Only when she closed her eyes and thought back to the moment when she had first been led down into the basement of the nondescript cabin deep in the woods of her great-aunt’s estate in Upstate New York and shown the wheel for that very first time—only then could she see what couldn’t be seen, the secret that had opened the doors to so many more secrets, a rushing, violent river of secrets that had changed her world and guided her life ever since.

  Imperceptible to the naked eye, the wheel was turning.

  More accurately, the spokes along the face of the wheel were shifting around the center, like the interior of a roulette wheel—but at a pace so slow that it could only be properly measured in nanoseconds.

  Jendari remembered what her fourteen-year-old self had thought when her great-aunt Milena, the woman who had raised her since the death of her father, had first told her the secret of the wheel. Even then, she had been skeptical that such a thing was possible. A bronze device older than the cabin they had been standing in, older than the towering fir trees in the forest around them, older than the bedrock beneath the cabin’s basement floor—a device built with such sophisticated inner gear-work—it didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t until many years later, when Jendari had the wheel placed in a high-powered X-ray machine developed specifically for the task, that she had finally been convinced that it was true.

  By then, of course, her aunt had given her many more revelations to be skeptical about. But at fourteen, the great bronze wheel had been enough to make her think her aunt had gone insane. When Milena had explained the purpose of the wheel—that it was, in fact, a cyclical calendar, not unlike the infamous calendar of the ancient Mayans, set on a vast, ten-thousand-year cycle—Jendari had known for certain: Her aunt had let a fairy tale corrode her brain.

  Jendari smiled to herself as she reopened her eyes and strode out from under the wheel, toward the glass shelves that ran along the back of the vault. If only her aunt had lived a little longer, how shocked she would have been to see how far her skeptical charge had dove into that fairy tale, and how much truth she had found at the core of what had once seemed like so much fantasy.

  A few feet beyond the wheel, Jendari passed between the two newest items in her vault’s collection: the statue of the female warrior, now affixed to a clear, crystal pedestal, and the Sumerian tablet with the intertwined snakes—the double helix—etched across its center. The two new items fit perfectly with the other statues and artifacts strewn through the vault. A half-dozen similar female warriors, most of them smaller and in poorer condition, were scattered around the floor leading up to the glass shelves. Pottery shards, water-damaged coins, and even the odd breastplate and dagger, all imprinted with the snake-born double helix, filled many of the glass shelves. Jendari had spent a lifetime acquiring the items, spending tens of millions of dollars inserting Grange and his operatives into archaeological digs all over the world. And what she had achieved was nothing less than spectacular: the most complete collection of Amazonian artifacts in the world, arranged as chronologically as possible.

  Beginning with the undatable, ancient wheel; moving on to the Sumerian tablet and the warrior statue; then on into the Minoan period in Crete, through a pair of ivory war javelins; and on into the Mycenaean period, the era of Greek mythology from 1600 BC to 1100 BC, with numerous pottery shards retrieved from the ruins of various tholoi, the large, hivelike tombs of the period; and beyond that, to the Dorian invasion, various coins harvested from shipwrecks along the Ionic coast; and then into the classical period, the age of Alexander the Great, where the collection grew necessarily sparse. Alexander was the first of the true ancient skeptics, the first to call the Amazons myths, even as his own generals claimed in historical documents of the time to have fought against them, and that, in fact, Alexander himself had captured and impregnated the Amazon queen Thalestris. Alexander’s famous retort: “And where was I, then?” was recorded in a tract by Plutarch—an original copy of which Jendari had placed above a bronze breastplate, etched with the serpentine double helix, that Grange had found in a tomb dedicated to Thalestris that had been found via satellite telemetry, not eight miles from the ruins of the Library of Alexandria itself.

  From the classic period, the collection shifted to Hellenic Greece, and then into Roman and Egyptian artifacts, ending with an entire area dedicated to the most famous of the female pharaohs, Cleopatra, who had called herself a descendent of the Amazons, and had been often portrayed in modern romantic literature as such. Two glass shelves filled with bronze and gold jewelry—wrist cuffs, necklaces, and a dozen gem-bearing rings—were Jendari’s evidence that Cleopatra’s claims were only a fragment of the truth. Each piece of jewelry was imprinted somewhere on the band or base with the double helix—proof to Jendari that Cleopatra hadn’t simply been a descendent of the Amazons.

  She had also, almost certainly, been a member of the Order of Eve.

  Jendari was engulfed in a surge of adrenaline as she passed by the shelves containing Cleopatra’s jewelry, heading for the two glass units that held the most modern artifacts in the vault’s collection. She always felt this way by the time she’d reached the last few items in the vault: thrilled, alive, but also tinged by something that could only be described as guilt.

  She knew that her aunt’s shock would have shifted into something more akin to horror had she lived long enough to see what happened when Jendari’s skepticism gave way to something else: curiosity.

  Jendari stopped in front of the final shelving unit and pressed
her palm against another DNA scanner. As she waited for the shelf’s lock to disengage, she thought back again to that cabin in the woods, that basement, when she had stood in front of the bronze wheel and heard the fairy tale for the very first time: that Jendari Saphra, a fourteen-year-old orphan and heir to her dead parent’s multimillion dollar telecom, pharmaceutical, and biotech empire, was related by blood to a group that dated back longer than she could possibly imagine. A group that was supposedly a force of good in the world, tasked with protecting a secret that would eventually benefit all mankind. Guided by a cyclical calendar akin to the Mayans’, measured in millennia by a huge bronze wheel.

  Jendari had immediately begun to ask questions—but Milena had offered only blind faith. Even the highest level members of the group—wealthy, powerful women like Milena—did not know much beyond the barest details. Her only contact with the group had occurred once a year, when she would return to that same cabin, that same basement, to stand in front of the bronze wheel. If the group needed something from her, Milena would find a rolled parchment in an ornate iron box that sat on a stone bench her mother’s mother had placed beneath the wheel.

  At first, mostly for amusement’s sake, Jendari had accompanied her aunt on the visits to the cabin; it wasn’t until three years later, when Jendari turned seventeen, that she had witnessed Milena receiving a task—something mundane, involving the movement of money from one of her aunt’s corporate accounts into a Manhattan-run hedge fund.

  At the time, Jendari had assumed that at best, her aunt was stupid enough to have been the victim of some sort of scam. At worst, she had gone insane and dedicated her life to a bizarre cult. It wasn’t until years later that she had realized her aunt wasn’t stupid or insane. She was something worse.

  The glass cabinet slid open, and Jendari reached into the shelf to retrieve two black-and-white photographs, sealed in transparent acrylic. Her adrenaline continued to rise as she held the photographs close, squinting through the dim light to make out the details.