Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  The first photograph had been taken in front of what appeared to be the remains of a church. The church was badly damaged; the steeple had been entirely destroyed, and much of the rest of the building had collapsed in on itself, stone, chunks of mortar, and shattered bricks strewn haphazardly around what appeared to be a smoldering crater. Likewise, the area around the church was similarly ruined; buildings blasted down to their frames, sidewalks and narrow streets pockmarked with craters and holes. Though the image was black and white and grainy, any European history buff could have easily have identified what remained of the buildings and streets as pre-war Spanish in style; but no history expert could have explained what was going on in the forefront of the picture, directly in front of the church, where a group of workers were carrying what appeared to be a small iron crate out of the rubble, while in the background, three women stood watch. Two of the women were unrecognizable, but the third, younger than the rest, in a leather jacket, with short cropped hair, would have raised eyebrows the world over. Especially when one noticed the date in the corner of the photo, right beneath Jendari’s thumb: September 16, 1937.

  Two months after the woman in the picture supposedly had vanished at sea.

  Jendari traced a finger over the iron crate in the picture, pausing on the tiny, serpentine double helix carved into the bottom corner on the far left side, then over to the faces of the three women standing watch over the workmen. She wondered, had the women in the photo spent their lives like Milena, blindly believing, blindly following orders? Had they their own cabins, their own similar drop boxes, which they dutifully visited year after year, waiting for those mysterious twists of parchment? Was it just such a parchment that had led them to that burned out church, to oversee a task they couldn’t possibly understand, acting out of a pure sense of faith that left no room for questions?

  To Jendari, those women, like Milena, were far worse than stupid or insane. They were followers. Naive, weak, nothing but cogs—as thoughtless as ancient bronze gears. Taking orders from an authority they knew nothing about, carrying out tasks for reasons that were never explained. Milena couldn’t even answer the most simple questions about the Order to which she’d dedicated her wealth and her life—who they were, where they came from, what secret they were trying to protect—and yet she had expected Jendari to follow her down the rabbit hole of blind belief.

  Jendari had not been born to be a gear. Though she had followed her aunt to the cabin and the drop box year after year, her skepticism had grown into something fiery: a passion to know more. As she had reached adulthood, she had built her own private surveillance team, using profits from her burgeoning biotech empire. Behind Milena’s back, she had staked out the cabin.

  It had taken years, but eventually, she had documented the arrival of a courier, who she had traced to a corporate account at a New York consulting company. She had then tracked the financiers of the consulting house to a multinational conglomerate run out of Dubai. A private company, the Euphrates Conglomerate, which, on the surface, had been almost as mysterious as the fairy tale her aunt had told her. Euphrates had no listed board of directors, no CEO—just a number of employees who worked out of an office complex in the desert capital’s mercantile district. It was impossible to tell exactly what sort of business Euphrates was involved with; all Jendari’s surveillance team was able to uncover for sure was that the company had endowed more than a dozen museums around the world, creating departments dedicated to unearthing and procuring artifacts from a number of significant eras in ancient history. And secondly, that Euphrates had spent a considerable amount of money on a mystery project in South America, in a remote section of Brazil, two hundred miles through dense jungle from the interior city of Manaus.

  Jendari had known that her aunt would be angry at her efforts to learn more about the mysterious group behind the drop box. Milena had often told her that her own mother had passed down strict rules against digging deeper into what they were supposed to take on faith, and faith alone. But Jendari didn’t care about pseudoreligious mythology. She cared about the truth.

  Still, out of respect, she had waited until her aunt was on her deathbed, in the cancer wing of New York Hospital that Saphra Industries had endowed, to tell her what she had found. Jendari would never forget the look of betrayal and shock on her aunt’s face and the last words she had ever spoken to Jendari before she had passed away.

  You are unworthy.

  Jendari felt her smile stiffen as she was overcome by resolve. She turned to the second photo encased in protective acrylic.

  In the center of the photo was the same iron crate, being carried by a different set of faceless workers, in another part of the world.

  A mountainous forest, beneath a recently finished monument at the southern edge of Rio that would one day become one of the Seven Wonders of the World. And there, in the background again, three women. The two older women were different than in the first photo, yet still unrecognizable; but the third woman was the same. According to the date on the corner of the picture, she had traveled nearly around the world at a speed that only a few people of her era could.

  Jendari slid the photographs under her arm and headed back through the vault toward the circular titanium door.

  It was those two photographs that had been the first real evidence that Jendari had uncovered—three years after Milena Saphra’s death—that had led her to believe that the elder Saphra’s fairy tale had been built on a basis of truth. That her fairy tale did, in fact, revolve around a secret that went far beyond any sort of financial scam or religious cult.

  As Jendari crossed beneath the giant bronze wheel, the pilot’s voice once again reverberated out of the PA system:

  “We’ve reached ten thousand feet, and should be on the ground in seven minutes. The clouds have broken nicely, and there’s a great view of the rainforest on either side.”

  Jendari could picture the undulating sea of green as she touched another scanner and waited for the vault door to reopen, so she could return to her office and prepare herself for the next phase of her journey.

  It had been a long road, but she knew she was closer now than she had ever been. She could never have predicted the shift that had occurred in the past few days; like the spokes on the great bronze wheel, a part of her had always expected her journey to continue to move imperceptibly forward.

  She could not have foreseen that the twin brother of a murdered MIT scientist would have been the key to unlocking the true secret behind the Order of Eve.

  Milena Saphra would never have understood: Jendari was more than worthy. But she would never be content to be a gear, like her aunt, like the women in the photo, like the woman in the leather flight jacket who had traveled thousands of miles to deliver an iron crate.

  Jendari wasn’t a gear, and she didn’t believe in fairy tales. If the Order of Eve had truly been built around a secret—protected and hidden for nearly ten thousand years—Jendari wasn’t going to stop until she held that secret in her hand.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I don’t remember James Bond ever flying coach,” Andy said as he worked himself and his oversized duffel bag through the narrow passage between Jack and Sloane, who were seated in two aisle seats across from each other. “It’s hard enough getting all this spy shit through airport security—now I have to figure out a way to fit it in an overhead compartment?”

  Jack laughed, then noticed that Sloane hadn’t even cracked a smile. She had already unpacked her own carry-on, placing the items carefully across her lap and in the seat pocket in front of her. Jack saw an electronic reading device, a pair of boring-looking scientific journals, and the leather flight diary, which she’d held on to since they’d left the hotel room in Rio. The middle seat next to her was empty, and the heavyset guy in the window seat to her far left already had his head in a pillow, Xanaxed out for the long flight ahead.

  “James Bond wasn’t a doctoral student on a budget,” Jack said, but Andy was alr
eady two rows back, rushing to catch up to Dashia, who had already found their seats. It was unfortunate that all four of them couldn’t sit together, but booking internationally last minute was never optimal; add to that their shoe-string finances, and they were lucky they were only making a single stop as they nearly circumnavigated the globe.

  Not just a doctoral student on a budget, Jack corrected himself—two doctoral students, a botanist, and a field anthropologist, who was now working so far outside the box, he was flirting in the realm of fantasy. He hadn’t even tried to explain what he’d found at Christ the Redeemer to his department head—he’d just gone with a simple request for time and funds to continue the research that had started at the Temple of Artemis and led him down to Brazil. It wasn’t a complete lie; as impossible as it seemed, there appeared to be a firm connection between the Ancient Wonder of the World and the most modern of the new Seven Wonders, though Jack still had no idea why or how. He was just lucky that he’d earned enough credit with his superiors at Princeton that they were willing to give him a little leeway.

  Certainly, he was in a lot better political shape than Sloane; he’d heard part of her conversation with her supervising professor at Michigan through the cardboard-thin wall of the Rio hotel room. She’d practically had to beg the man for an expense account that would cover the coach ticket, and it was pretty obvious that she was taking a pretty big gamble attaching herself to Jack’s team without any real support from her academic superiors. It seemed obvious to Jack that the paint chip and the red vine she’d found in the Colosseum were her version of a Hail Mary; the continuance of her career at Michigan might very well depend on where those clues led.

  Jack had no illusions about why Sloane had followed him to Rio, or what had motivated her to join his team on this next leg of their journey. Despite what she’d said, it wasn’t to pick his brain about the Amazons—a civilization which Sloane had noted again and again, she firmly believed was little more than a well-detailed myth—or to try and help him understand why they were now in the possession of two bronze snake segments, found in two separate Wonders of the Modern World. She was there to find just enough information to get her byline into one of the prestigious journals of her discipline. She was there because of a plant—something she considered a scientific riddle—and she was searching for a scientific answer that she could take back to her laboratory to study and deconstruct.

  Jack, for his part, had spent the better part of his career trying to get beyond the science and to stay far away from the laboratory. As his father had always said, the laboratory was where you ended up when you could no longer hack it in the field. Kyle Grady was pushing sixty-four, and he hadn’t set foot in a lab for as long as Jack had been alive.

  Jack was still picturing his father, deep in the African bush, probably covered in face paint and dancing around a fresh kill with whatever new tribal family had adopted him, when the 747 began to pull away from the gate, taxiing across the tarmac. Jack glanced over at Sloane again, who was flipping between two pages in the flight diary, tracing a series of jagged lines with her finger. Her concentration was impressive; she didn’t even glance up from the diary when the airplane made its tight final turn onto the runway and the giant turbine engines roared to life. It wasn’t until the plane was arcing upward into the air, pressing Jack back into his seat, that she brushed an errant lock of red-brown hair out of her eyes.

  “June 1, 1937,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard across the aisle over the growl of the engines. “She takes off from Miami, Florida, making stops across South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and ends up in Lae, New Guinea, on June 29.”

  It was an abrupt way to launch a conversation, but Jack had already begun to grow used to Sloane’s clipped mannerisms; she didn’t like to waste words, and he’d yet to see a real emotion spread across her tight, nearly porcelain white features. It was obvious she was a woman who put a lot of walls between herself and the people around her. She didn’t seem at all displeased that there was an aisle between them, even as she continued the conversation that had started in the hotel room, when she’d first told him her incredible theory about the flight diary—and whose airplane Jack had found beneath the statue of Christ the Redeemer.

  “And a few days later,” Sloane continued, placing her glasses back over her gray-blue eyes. “She vanishes. Never to be seen again.”

  Jack nodded. The 747 was banking hard to the left as it cut through the cloud cover on its way to a cruising altitude.

  “I think there was a book. And a movie. And a couple of documentaries.”

  “There have been a number of theories,” Sloane said, ignoring him. “The most likely was that she’d miscalculated the distance, run out of fuel, and crashed during a mid-Pacific hop to Howland Island. Another possibility is that she’d turned back for some reason and had crashed on a nearby desolate atoll. The most outlandish theory was that she was a spy working for either the US government or the Germans, and she’d intentionally ditched the plane, then been secretly picked up by a naval ship, given a new identity, and had lived out the rest of her life, hiding in plain view.”

  As the 747 leveled out, Jack could see the flight attendants at the end of the aisle unstrapping themselves from their jump seats, getting ready to begin the first of their countless rituals. Soon they’d be pushing carts full of miniature beverages up and down the narrow aisles, checking seat belts, lowering window shades, and generally trying to make an eternity trapped in a flying tin can seem almost bearable. Jack figured he and Sloane had about ten more minutes to get to some sort of understanding of what the hell they were getting themselves into before the distractions became too many.

  “Any of those theories have her heading to Brazil, then ditching her plane beneath Christ the Redeemer?” he asked.

  He didn’t expect a smile—hell, if Andy couldn’t get her to crack her façade, he’d never had a chance. Still, he at least hoped for some acknowledgment that he was trying.

  “According to this flight diary, she didn’t go straight to Brazil,” Sloane said, her voice as steady as ever. “She took off from New Guinea on July 2 at midnight, then headed into the Pacific, toward Howland Island, as she was supposed to; instead of reaching Howland, she touched down on Gardner Island, a little known spot in the Phoenix Island group nearby. From there, the plane doubled back toward Asia, and on into Europe, ending in an airfield near a village called Cuarzon, in the South of Spain. Two days later, she left Spain and flew back again across the Atlantic, finally heading toward Rio, Brazil.”

  Jack looked past Sloane’s finger, toward the lines and numbers that spread out across the pages of the flight diary. He was impressed that she’d been able to interpret the notations so quickly. She was stiff and way too logical for his liking, but she wasn’t going to be completely useless.

  “That’s quite a flight plan,” Jack said. “Pretty incredible evidence that we’re diving into something extraordinary.”

  “Actually, like I said before, I believe it’s nothing more than an elaborate hoax. I don’t know who set this up, and I don’t know why—I’m just telling you what we’re supposed to believe, based on this diary.”

  Jack touched the backpack he’d stored snuggly beneath the seat in front of him.

  “These artifacts seem pretty real to me,” he said quietly. He could feel the bulge of the stone tablet beneath the vinyl of the bag, and beneath that, the two snake segments, which he’d wrapped separately in hand towels from the Rio hotel. They’d attempted to place them gently together in the hotel, but the pieces hadn’t fit; they hadn’t wanted to risk damaging them by forcing the matter.

  Even worse, Jack had been forced to take both segments out of the bag while going through security at the Rio airport; when the Brazilian equivalent to a TSA agent had tried to poke a gloved finger at the mechanical gears within one of the segments, he’d nearly decked the guy. Luckily, Sloane had stepped in, telling the man that the snake pieces were fragi
le antique toys she had bought for her cousin. The Brazilian TSA agent had shrugged, obviously more interested in the bottle of shampoo Andy had tried sneaking through in his duffel bag beneath the infrared dish and the climbing rope—both of which had garnered surprisingly little attention.

  Sloane shrugged. There was no way she could explain away the segments or the stone tablet. Especially since she’d seen the exact same picture on the wall in the hypogeum of the Colosseum and after Jack had explained to her that he’d also seen and photographed the same painting in the pit beneath the Temple of Artemis.

  For the moment, whatever Sloane believed, they needed to treat what they were diving into as more than a hoax.

  “I’ve never heard of Cuarzon,” he said, going back to the narrative she’d just given him. “But Spain in the late thirties was caught up in a pretty intense civil war. Towns and villages were getting bombed and burned into oblivion, and almost six hundred thousand people died.”

  “The Spanish Civil War. A devastating time—but what does it have to do with what we’ve found?”

  “Maybe the destruction going on during the Spanish Civil War had something to do with the transportation of these artifacts halfway around the world. Christ the Redeemer had just finished construction, and though it wasn’t yet a Wonder of the World, it was as impressive as anything that had ever been built in modern times.”

  A war was going on in Spain, towns were burning to the ground all over the country, and according to the flight diary, that’s where the plane he’d found beneath Corcovado had made a stop after the pilot had faked her own disappearance. Jack wondered, Is it possible that the stone tile and the snake segment were moved to a place that seemed safer than where they had been stored before? Had they been intentionally hidden beneath a Wonder of the World?