Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  The line of thought pricked at Jack’s mind. He’d been studying one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for some time because of what he believed to be a connection to the ancient Amazons. Along the way, he’d gained a broader knowledge of the other Ancient Wonders, and he knew that six of the seven had been destroyed over the years by natural disasters and wars. Even so, most of them had lasted hundreds, if not thousands of years.

  The Seven Wonders of the Modern World, by the very nature of their worldwide designation, would probably last almost as long. Didn’t that make the Seven Wonders the perfect hiding places for something that was supposed to stay hidden for hundreds, if not thousands of years?

  “Supposing any of this is true,” Sloane said. “What could be so important about the tablet, and the segments, that you’d need to hide them at all? And the time frame we’re talking about—it’s hard to even fathom.”

  Jack had to agree with her. The object he’d recovered from the statue in Brazil had presumably been there as long as the ditched airplane—more than eighty years. The segment Sloane had recovered at the Colosseum had been sealed into an aqueduct perhaps as many as two thousand years ago. It was almost incomprehensible that the two objects could be related over such a long period of time, but there they were, wrapped in cheap, dirty hand towels in the backpack beneath his feet.

  “A pair of snake segments,” he said, mostly to himself. “Connected to a picture of women warriors carrying a tablet out of a forest—”

  “A garden,” Sloane corrected.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sloane’s voice sped up a notch as Jack saw that the flight attendants had one of the beverage carts unlocked and moving already—still a good fifteen rows away, but making its way toward them, one miniature bottle of booze at a time.

  “It’s not a forest in the picture, it’s a garden. The variety of plants and vines, and the way they are planted—grouped by species, carefully intertwined so that the more aggressive genuses don’t overwhelm the more placid—implies that they were cultivated and controlled. It’s not haphazard or random growth. Hence, it’s a garden—not a forest.”

  Jack’s mind started to churn. His first thought went right to his wheel-house.

  “Like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”

  Sloane shook her head.

  “I thought so too, at first. But then I looked up the Ancient Wonder and saw that every image of the Hanging Gardens, and every description—from Herodotus on up—describes a terraced palace, with sophisticated vertical irrigation. The garden on our tablet isn’t terraced. And it doesn’t appear to be mechanically irrigated.”

  Jack had another thought. The cart was eight rows away now.

  “The Garden of Eden? I didn’t spend much time in Sunday School, but if I remember my Genesis correctly, it was a natural garden, wasn’t it?”

  “It makes sense that you’d go there,” Sloane said. “Considering where you just were. But garden imagery is common to almost every culture, and nearly every religion on Earth, past and present, begins with flora: a garden, a vine, a Tree of Life. Pick any god you’d like, the first thing he does is make a plant. Only then, he starts thinking about people.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. That had almost qualified as a joke.

  “You know a lot about religion?”

  “I know a lot about gardens. Being a botanical geneticist.”

  She was definitely warming up—but then she shrugged again and closed the leather flight diary against her lap.

  “But I still can’t see how any of this is really relevant. The facts we’re dealing with don’t have anything to do with religious gardens or any other sort of superstition. What we know—and all that we know—is that someone hid the tablet next to a ditched airplane beneath Christ the Redeemer and hid a snake segment at the statue’s peak. They hid another segment beneath the Colosseum. Whether either of these events happened a hundred years ago, a couple thousand years ago, or last week, the fact remains that these items were hidden in two of the most famous architectural achievements in the world. Which leads me to believe they were hidden, but also meant to one day be found.”

  Cold, scientific logic. Jack wasn’t certain that such an approach meant anything, in the face of what they had found—but he was willing to go along.

  “Meant to be found by whom?”

  “Presumably not us,” Sloane said.

  And presumably not my brother, Jack thought to himself.

  The flight attendants were so close now, he could hear them chatting to the nearby passengers about the breakfast options. He looked around, at the people in the seats in the rows in front of him, at the strangers—men, women, a few children—that filled almost every other seat on the partially booked flight.

  If his brother had truly been murdered because of what he’d found, Jack and Sloane were potentially in danger as well. Jack didn’t care so much about his own safety; hell, he could handle himself, and he’d faced some pretty hairy situations over the years. But when he thought about Andy and Dashia, near the back of the plane, probably going over the same set of mysteries, he became extremely uncomfortable. Then he glanced back at Sloane, who had traded the flight diary for one of her scientific journals. The title of the article she was reading had something to do with dandelions and allergens. Not the sort of thing Jack would choose to begin twenty-two hours of traveling from Brazil to India by way of Frankfurt, but then again, he’d just learned the difference between a forest and garden.

  He reminded himself: Sloane Costa was there on her own accord. Not because of his brother, not even because she truly believed there was a connection between the Seven Wonders of the World. Sloane was there because she was desperate, and trying to keep her job.

  Even so, watching her sitting there, with her perfect posture, her hair combed so tightly against her head that he could see every strand, Jack knew that if what they were diving into was truly dangerous, if people were willing to kill to keep whatever it was a secret …

  It would be up to him to keep Sloane, and the rest of his team, safe. Which meant somehow, he needed to figure out what the hell that were getting themselves into—as fast as he could.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The rat was huge.

  At least eighteen inches tail to snout, but it seemed almost twice as big, lunging through the air at almost supernatural speed, front claws outstretched, oversized jaws wide open, fangs bared and dripping fetid teardrops of saliva toward the steaming sidewalk.

  The thing was moving so damn fast, Jack didn’t have time to think; his reflexes took over, and suddenly he was diving forward, catching Sloane around the waist with one arm and lifting her a full foot off the ground. Sloane screamed in shock, grabbing at him with her hands, but he ignored her, spinning on his heels away from the rabid creature.

  He was halfway around when he realized he had miscalculated Sloane’s weight; her body was a good deal tighter and toned beneath the thin material of her pantsuit than he had expected, and the added momentum sent them teetering across the crowded sidewalk, right over the low stone curb. Only a last-second adjustment—a dip in his knees, a twist of his waist, putting her halfway over his right shoulder—kept them from toppling beneath the motorcycle rickshaw that was blasting past them, going the wrong way through the surging, traffic-laden street.

  And then Jack heard the laughter, which seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Still holding Sloane over one shoulder, he whirled back toward the rat—and that’s when he noticed the collar, studded with what appeared to be rhinestones, tight around the hissing creature’s throat. A metal linked chain ran from the collar to a steel post set in front of a narrow glass storefront. Above the rat, a web of cracks spread across most of the glass, but in between the jagged shards, Jack could see shelves lining three walls of a space barely larger than an airplane lavatory. The shelves were cluttered with cheap-looking souvenirs: wood-carved Buddhas, brassy statuettes of various Hindu gods, ornate, pa
inted festival masks with wide eyes, beards, and toothy grins beneath headdresses made of peacock feathers and dried flowers.

  “Unless you want to go for an encore,” Sloane hissed in his ear, “I think you can put me down now.”

  Jack glanced sheepishly at the small throng that had gathered around them on the crowded sidewalk. Nobody else seemed bothered by the snapping mutant rodent, still hurling itself repeatedly into the air toward every errant calf that seemed within a fang’s length of the end of the creature’s chain.

  Then again, Jack shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this wasn’t his first time in Delhi.

  “Sorry,” he said, gently returning Sloane to her feet. Then he pointed past the rat, at the storefront. “Heck of a marketing gimmick. Nothing like a little rabies to make you feel right at home.”

  Sloane brushed dust from the street off of her slacks. The crowd around them had returned to its normal pace, which meant it was like trying to stand still in torrential floodwaters. Arms and knees and elbows everywhere as a continuous stream of humanity buffeted by, taking up nearly every inch of the cobbled sidewalk. The street was no better. They had been lucky that it was just one rickshaw going the wrong way that had almost decapitated them. The crumbling pavement was so thick with traffic, it was impossible to know where one lane ended and another began.

  “This is the place?” Sloane asked, straightening up. She looked at the broken window, and then at the rat. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jack grinned. Despite the look on her face, Sloane had actually been taking things in stride since they’d landed at New Delhi International, which was really the only way to face India. The country in general, and Delhi in particular, was a place of such violent extremes, you either went with the flow, or you went crazy trying to swim against it. From the minute they’d stepped out of the modern airport into that thick blanket of oppressive heat and fought their way past a sea of beggars, street salesmen, and taxi drivers to the pair of three-wheeled vehicles Andy had hired to squire them about town, it had been like diving into a sea of perpetual motion. The deeper they’d gone into the old city nestled in the heart of the throbbing Eastern metropolis, the more frenetic the pace had become. Everything in Old Delhi moved; winding spaghetti twists of streets pulsing past slums built right in the shadows of fancy condominiums, outdoor markets teeming with salesman selling anything and everything, seedy alleys crawling with beggars, pickpockets, and packs of wild children. The place was alive, beautiful and horrible and terrifying and thrilling, all at once.

  Jack had been to India a half a dozen times before he’d learned to just breathe—no matter how thick and pungent the air seemed. But Sloane hadn’t seemed fazed at all. There were no cracks in her cool façade, no matter how hot it had gotten around them.

  “A souvenir shop?” she said.

  “Something like that,” Jack said, leading her to the door on the other side of the broken glass, keeping a healthy distance away from the leaping rat.

  As he opened the door, he took one last glance down the street behind them, not sure what he was looking for in a mob of strangers, most in traditional Indian garb, flowing white, brown, and gray shirts and pants tied at the waist. But since leaving Brazil, his paranoia had continued to grow. It was part of the reason he’d decided to split his team up upon landing in Delhi, and had sent Andy and Dashia out on their own to make arrangements for the next leg of their journey. Truth be told, he’d rather have been alone at the moment. And it wasn’t just the thought of what had happened to Jeremy that had him on edge.

  “Just follow my lead,” he whispered to Sloane as he stepped into the shop. “And let me do the talking.”

  “I thought this guy was supposed to be a friend of your father’s,” Sloane whispered back. “I thought that’s why we were coming to him for information.”

  “I didn’t say he was a friend, just that he and my father spent time together out in the field.”

  “What sort of field?”

  Jack didn’t answer, instead shutting the door behind him, effectively cutting off the sound from the street outside. The shop was deserted, the cluttered shelves around them much more towering up close, some of them seeming to be on the verge of collapsing under the weight of so many wares. Jack counted at least thirty Buddhas to his right, of assorted sizes and poses. The shelves, filled with statues depicting various other gods, were almost twice as crowded, the diversity of shapes, creatures, and stances almost mind-numbing.

  “So many gods,” Sloane said, her voice echoing off the bare cement ceiling and floor.

  “So many religions,” Jack said. “Most people think of India as divided between Hindus and Muslims, but there are actually over a hundred different religions here. As well as eighty-five indigenous languages—eleven of them official. People say that America is a melting pot, but we’ve got nothing on this place.”

  “Melting’s the appropriate word. I think it’s hotter in here than it was outside. Is this place even open? I don’t think anybody’s home.”

  Jack looked past the farthest shelving unit, which was only about five feet in front of him, to a small desk and cash register stuffed into a corner beneath a poster of some famous Bollywood star decked out in bright red robes. Sloane was right, there didn’t seem to be anyone manning the place. Jack was about to suggest that they return later when he noticed a discoloration in the wall behind the register—and realized he was looking at a door. Well, half a door; it couldn’t have been more than two feet wide, and there was no knob.

  “Stay here,” Jack said. “I’m going to check something out.”

  He hadn’t taken more than two steps toward the cash register when a buzzer went off somewhere above his head, and suddenly, the half door swung open and a man with wild eyes came barreling out of the opening toward him. The man looked disheveled and unshaven, except for his head, which was as shiny as blown glass. The man was average size, a little smaller than Jack; but there was a gun in his right hand, aimed directly at Jack’s chest. The gun looked like a museum piece—a German Luger with a pencil-neck tip and an ink-black grip—but it was coming toward Jack faster than the rat outside on the sidewalk.

  Again, Jack let his reflexes take over. He stepped into the attack with his left foot, putting himself out of line with the gun barrel, while in the same motion his right hand slid around beneath his jacket and withdrew his iták. Before the man’s wild eyes even saw what was happening, Jack had the blade out, caught the man by the wrist, and slammed the iták’s hilt down on the back of the man’s extended hand.

  The man screamed, his fingers opening as the gun clattered harmlessly to the floor. He yanked his wrist free, then stepped back and looked wildly from Jack to Sloane. Jack lowered the iták, holding up his free palm.

  “We’re not here to cause any trouble.”

  “I got nothing worth stealing,” the man spat back in a heavy, down-market English accent. “And if you’re with Interpol, I ain’t the man on the posters. It’s a goddamn case of mistaken identity, it is.”

  “We’re not thieves and we’re not cops. This is Sloane Costa, and my name is Jack Grady.”

  The man’s eyes got a little less wild.

  “Grady?”

  “Kyle Grady is my father.”

  A wide smile broke across the man’s unshaven face. There was a tooth or two missing, but overall, it made him look almost friendly.

  “Little Jacky. I remember you when you were just a tow-headed shit. Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  “Didn’t really get a chance.”

  “Sorry about that,” the man said, still grinning as he rubbed the growing bruise on the back of his hand. “You’ve got your dad’s reflexes, that’s for sure. Can’t tell you how many scars I’ve got from wrestling with your old man, back when we were hopping freights along the Trans-Siberian.”

  The man pointed at the iták that was still hanging from Jack’s grip.

  “Visayan Islands. I’d
say Kalip Tribe, up the Northern Shore. You looking to sell? The grip alone’d probably get you three grand.”

  Jack shook his head, both impressed and unnerved by how accurate the man’s guess had been. Then again, from what his father had told him, Gordon Unger had an eye for antiquities. Especially objects from Southeast Asia, although his focus had primarily shifted to the Indian subcontinent in recent years. Kyle Grady had referenced Unger a number of times, back when Jack had been spending time with him; he was supposedly the man you went to when you needed information that involved Southeast Asia. Jack’s father had also warned him that information from Unger often came with a price—but Jack needed an expert, and he didn’t have time to go touring museums.

  “We’re not here to sell anything. We’re here to ask you a few questions about the Taj Mahal.”

  Unger laughed, then saw that Jack was serious. He waved his unbruised hand toward one of the nearby shelves, which was loaded with miniature plastic and wooden models of the great Indian Wonder of the World.

  “You came to the right place. I’ve also got posters and some tourist maps, if you’re keen.”

  He shifted his gaze from Jack to Sloane. His eyes lingered a little too long as he looked her over, then he pointed his finger back at Jack.

  “But something tells me you’re not here for a poster or a map.”

  He grinned, and suddenly bent forward to retrieve the gun from the floor. He jammed it into his belt, then turned and headed to the half door behind the cash register.

  “Follow me, Little Jacky. We’ll see if I’ve got something in the back that can help you out.”

  • • •

  “Quite simply, it’s the greatest love story ever told.”

  The teeth weren’t quite as bad seen through the neck of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, but there was still something unsettling about that grin, halfway between wolf and weasel, which were two of the words Jack’s father had often used to describe Unger, his former expedition partner. Kyle Grady had never been clear about where, or for how long, he had traveled with the Brit; but it was clear the two had spent some quality time living in the wilderness of at least two former Soviet republics before Unger had turned his focus toward Southeast Asia.