Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  “We were unable to get close enough to know for sure,” she said, her words tinged with an accent that was very difficult to place. A hint of Portuguese, a hint of Spanish, but also something else that Jendari had never heard anywhere else. “We couldn’t risk exposure. However, we believe he found something hidden in the canopy beneath the statue, which led him to a second item—hidden in Christ the Redeemer’s face.”

  Jendari raised her eyebrows. It wasn’t at all what she had expected to hear—but the fact that at least one of the two items he had found had been hidden inside the Wonder of the World set her heart racing. Real, solid evidence had eluded her for so long: The very nature of the Wonders made them impossible to excavate, even for a woman as rich and powerful as she. The best she could do was station Vika’s people at safe distances at each Wonder, keeping an eye out for anything unusual.

  Such as an anthropologist scaling the chest and shoulders of a one-hundred-foot-tall statue of Christ, half a mile above the city of Rio.

  “Unfortunately,” Vika continued, “we were unable to survey the cave after he left, because it was destroyed. We can’t be sure what he found was contained within a crate. After retrieving both items, he returned to his hotel and immediately booked a flight to India.”

  Jendari nodded, her excitement growing. Whether or not Jack Grady had retrieved the crate the workers were carrying in Jendari’s photographs, he had obviously found something that had led him to the top of Christ the Redeemer. Whatever the second item was that he had found, it had led him to India—and assuredly, the next Wonder of the World.

  “One more thing,” Vika said, no inflexion beyond the accent. “He was joined at his hotel by a woman named Sloane Costa, a scientist. We’re in the midst of compiling her dossier, so far mostly unremarkable—except for one notable exception. She recently conducted research at the Colosseum, in Rome.”

  “Is she connected to the twins?”

  “I don’t believe so. But she joined Jack and his two graduate students on the flight to India.”

  So the woman was involved, now. Which meant she’d found something at the Colosseum that had led her to Jack Grady.

  There was no doubt in Jendari’s mind: She had been right to let this anthropologist run with whatever his brother had found. It appeared that Jack Grady was succeeding in days at what she and her operatives had been working on for a decade.

  The question was, how much farther should she let him go? Certainly, Vika could take him out now and retrieve whatever it was he had found at Christ the Redeemer.

  With Jeremy Grady, there had been no doubt. He had simply been a threat that needed to be removed. But Jack was different: He was useful. She had seen it the minute Vika had given her his dossier; he was an explorer, an adventurer, a problem solver. Exactly what she needed.

  Whatever he’d found in Brazil was leading him to India; no doubt he was interpreting clues, finding his way through to the Order’s hidden secret. If Jendari took what he had and eliminated him, would she be able to continue what he had started? There was no way to know for sure.

  Which meant that Jack Grady was still useful—for the moment.

  “Continue your surveillance,” she said, still listening to the staccato report of the submachine guns from across the village. “Find out what he’s got, and where it’s leading him. But keep whatever distance you can.”

  As usual, Vika remained still and unresponsive. Even so, Jendari knew she would obey, perfectly and precisely. For the time being, Jendari would let Jack continue doing the hard work for them.

  As legend had it, the Amazons had always employed men to do the dirty work that they found beneath them; in fact, the legend went, Amazon warriors would maim the men whom they captured—as it was thought that invalids made better workers, and more loyal lovers.

  In a way, Jendari had already maimed Jack by killing his twin, his other half. Now he would find the secret of the Order of Eve for her, and then she would have Vika finish the job.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  If Christine could see me now …

  Sloane almost cracked a smile, imagining the expression on her older sister’s face—if only Christine could have somehow magically materialized next to her on the floor of the bobbing wooden skiff. Just seeing Sloane crouching there, so low that her face was almost touching the damp, rancid floorboards of the barely river-worthy craft, hands furiously working the zipper of her rented rubber wetsuit, which had caught halfway up her cleavage, would have left her sister speechless. Seeing Jack Grady crouched next to her—his rugged features halfway covered in a silk Indian scarf, his muscled body perfectly filling out his matching wetsuit beneath a loose, gray smock he’d bought off the fisherman who’d rented them the boat, his deep blue eyes barely visible, scanning the Yamuna River as he piloted the skiff against the current—would have knocked Christine right overboard in shock.

  “I think we’re clear,” Jack whispered, his voice barely carrying over the sound of the skiff’s motor and the lapping of the murky water. “Another ten yards, and we should be at the right spot.”

  Sloane shivered, still fighting with the zipper. She was amazed at how calm Jack sounded, considering what they were about to attempt. A moment ago, they’d passed right by a security cutter heading the other direction along the river, carrying three uniformed Indian officers, and Sloane had nearly hyperventilated. If the officers had decided to check out their skiff—and had seen Sloane in her wetsuit—God only knew what would have happened. But Jack had simply nodded at the men, grinning amiably beneath his scarf, and they’d gone right on by.

  So much confidence, so much bravado, so much eagerness to dive right into things, no matter how risky or insane—Jack certainly wasn’t like any scientist she’d ever met before. He was so damn sure of himself. He was just the sort of man she’d always done her best to avoid; a self-styled adventurer, a rogue who’d somehow gotten himself a PhD. Still, he wasn’t stupid; there was a natural intelligence in him that she couldn’t deny. The works she’d read by him on the mythical Amazons, though completely fanciful, were well written, and he was obviously respected in his profession. Field anthropology, sure, and a strain of the discipline that seemed to involve safari jackets, grappling hooks, and one mean-looking Filipino sword—but still, he wasn’t all show.

  Even so, he had to be feeling a tiny fraction of what she was going through—if not the fear, at least the sheer disbelief that a tiny clue found at the top of Christ the Redeemer could somehow have led them here. The truth was, when she had first tracked Jack down in Brazil through his work on the Amazons, she hadn’t expected more than an expert opinion on the red vine and the painting she had photographed beneath the Colosseum. She couldn’t have guessed that he’d have found a second snake segment—or that the two of them had somehow independently stumbled into a mystery that connected at least two of the Modern Wonders.

  She didn’t really believe that it could possibly go any farther than that; Jack’s insistence that the pictogram on his parchment was a clear link to the Taj Mahal didn’t exactly seem scientific to her. It was based on a fantastical—and thus unscientific—premise: that his murdered brother had uncovered an overarching link between the Ancient and Modern Wonders. But even so, she found herself unable to walk away. It wasn’t just the paper she hoped to write about the seed and the vine or the fact that she was trying to save her job at Michigan, it was the need to find a scientific answer to all of this, because without one she was going to end up just like Jack Grady, chasing fantasies.

  “How can you be sure we’re there?” she asked, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice. For some reason, she didn’t want him to know how scared she actually was.

  “I’m counting the windows,” he said.

  She raised her head, looking over the edge of the skiff toward the shore, about thirty yards away. Though it was twenty minutes to midnight, and a thick fog had just begun to settle in over the water around them, there was no missing the spect
acular Wonder, rising up in the darkness—the huge, curved onion of a dome with its golden finial spiking out of its peak, the vast arch at the center, the matching, smaller arches that signaled doors, windows, and apertures across the glimmering white marble façade, and of course, the four immense minarets, daggers reaching right up into the cloudless sky.

  Even in the darkness, it was enough to make Sloane gasp. When she noticed Jack looking at her, she quickly shook the awe away. She wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, about him—aside from the obvious—that pushed her buttons, but she found herself even more guarded than usual in his presence.

  “You’re serious?” she asked.

  He smiled, then turned his right palm over, showing her his smartphone, running a GPS app. She blushed, feeling foolish. Of course a field anthropologist would know how to use GPS. That disgusting grave robber, Unger, had gotten a precise location off of his blueprint after he’d told them the only viable way into the historic monument. If he was right, and Jack’s phone wasn’t misleading them, all that was left was the hard part.

  “Here we are,” Jack said, cutting the skiff’s engines.

  The air around them went near silent, except for the water against the wood. The bobbing increased, and Sloane felt a surge of nausea in her stomach, which she quickly pushed back down. Jack reached behind himself and retrieved a pair of oxygen tanks attached to regulators, along with matching clear plastic masks. It took him less than a minute to expertly slip his tank over his shoulder, letting his mask hang down around his neck. Then he glanced at Sloane.

  “Ah, you need a little help?”

  “I took scuba in high school. I know how to put on an oxygen tank.”

  “I mean with the zipper,” Jack said.

  Sloane looked down and saw that the damn thing had receded almost to the bottom of her rib cage. She blushed, then yanked the zipper upward as hard as she could, until it clicked into its proper place, flush with her throat. Then she took the oxygen tank out of his hands and with some difficulty angled it over her shoulders. She was still working on the mask and regulator when Jack propped himself up onto the edge of the skiff, his back to the sparkling Taj Mahal. To his left, Sloane could just make out the beginning of the thousand-foot-long, carefully cultivated greenery that stretched out beyond the marble tomb, divided into its four quarters by the cross work of raised paths.

  It was not lost on Sloane that here in front of them was yet another spiritually significant garden—supposedly, a representation of the green Paradise written about in the Koran, Jannah, the Islamic version of heaven—described as a garden of infinite abundance fed by four rivers, much as the Garden of Eden in Genesis was fed by four rushing tributaries. And considering what Unger had told them about the Taj perhaps having an even older history lodged in Hinduism, the garden could also be seen as an interpretation of the four-fold garden described in the Vedas, the Sanskrit text dating back to 1500 BC—considered the original scripture of Hinduism.

  Sloane wasn’t sure what it all meant, but somehow, it felt significant. The painting she’d seen at the Colosseum, the tablet Jack had found beneath Christ the Redeemer, the same image he’d reported seeing beneath the Temple of Artemis—they all revolved around garden imagery. And here they were, in front of the Taj Mahal, facing yet another garden with ancient, historical significance.

  What could it possibly mean? Sloane knew that Jack believed his brother had uncovered a link between the Seven Wonders of the Modern World—something important enough that he had been murdered because of it. Could that link have something to do with the garden imagery in the paintings? The garden that seemed to pop up in so many different religions, in so many vastly different cultures around the world?

  Sloane didn’t have time to ponder the question any longer as Jack gave her a thumbs-up, then flicked on a waterproof flashlight he’d attached to his left wrist.

  “Stick close, it’s going to get very thick down there. And watch out for alligators.”

  Sloane stared at him.

  “Another joke?” she said, stiffly.

  Jack laughed, then yanked his mask over his eyes.

  “Yes. There aren’t any alligators in India.”

  Right before he put the regulator in his mouth, he gave her a wink from behind the transparent plastic.

  “Around here, they call them crocodiles.”

  And with that, he kicked himself over the edge.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  Ten feet below the surface of the river, Jack kicked against the current, chasing the eerie yellow cone from his flashlight through the murky water. He couldn’t see Sloane next to him, but he could feel her presence, the way the bubbles from her regulator swirled around her elongated body, mingling with his own, spiraling upward toward the chop above their heads. Every now and then he felt her hand against his wetsuit, but overall he was relieved to see she had no trouble keeping up with his pace; she was in much better shape than he would have expected from a botanist. Still, it was obvious from the moment she’d followed him into the room-temperature water and hung there in the murk, kicking furiously until she’d caught sight of his light and relaxed, that she was far out of her comfort zone.

  Jack slowed for a brief moment to check their progress on his waterproof phone, tucked into a pocket next to the flashlight. Though he’d lost satellite reception the minute he’d broken the surface, the electronic compass was still operational, and he could see that they were more than halfway to their target. That is, if Unger had been telling them the truth—and if his sources had been selling more than some faked photographs and a bullshit story. Jack didn’t trust Unger any more than he trusted the rat outside of Unger’s shop. The fact that Unger had offered to meet them on the other side of the river to escort them back to their hotel when they’d returned from their expedition wasn’t exactly comforting. But Jack figured he could handle the antiquities smuggler. He was more concerned about returning empty-handed.

  After a slight adjustment in direction, he kicked off again, Sloane’s flippers parallel with his own. Another ten minutes piloting through the murk, and he began to see a shape take form ahead, a cliff-like slope of rocks and mud rising up from the bottom of the river, a sign that they were getting close to the shore. Jack knew from Unger’s blueprints that they were now swimming in the shadow of the backside of the Taj, to the right of the center of the building and the massive onion dome, which would be looming a hundred and fifteen feet above the river, set a dozen yards back from a low breakwall. Though most of the mausoleum complex was bordered by a red stone fence, the architects who had built the Wonder had used the river itself as a natural fourth wall. No doubt, scuba gear had not been on their minds.

  Jack slowed his kicking as they approached the slope, reaching out to gently grab Sloane’s wrist. He held his other arm straight out, using the flashlight to scan the rocks and mud, first horizontally, and then vertically. An errant fish flashed through the cone of yellow, but otherwise it was all thick mud and jagged stone, leading down God only knew how far. Jack was beginning to get concerned, when Sloane jerked her wrist free of his grip and jabbed a finger at a downward angle to the very bottom corner of the cone of light.

  Jack’s eyes widened behind his mask. There it was, almost invisible between two jutting edges of rock: a circular opening, two feet across, bordered in chipped marble. Jack kicked twice with his flippers, exhaling as he pushed himself the last few feet downward until he was flush with the marble lip of the opening. Sloane floated down next to him, then began tracing the dark stains of moss and river algae that ran down from the edges of the marble. No doubt she could identify every strain of flora that had exploited whatever drainage the ancient inhabitants of the immense mausoleum had generated. If exploiting what was essentially a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old drainpipe was good enough for moss and algae, Jack figured it was good enough for him.

  Grinning, he put his hands on the base of the opening and
started to pull himself inside when a dull clang reverberated through the water around him. He jerked back—and saw that Sloane was pointing at his oxygen tank. He looked back at the opening and realized she was right; there was barely enough room for his shoulders, let alone the breathing contraption on his back.

  He leaned forward, holding the flashlight inside the opening, following the light with his eyes as far as it went. The marble-lined drainpipe seemed to be sloping gently upward, maybe five or ten degrees from the horizontal, but it also appeared to be full of water for as far as he could see—not far in the murky water. From Unger’s blueprints, Jack doubted the cylindrical marble pipe was much longer than fifteen yards—but then again, there was no way to know how much might have changed in more than three centuries.

  Still, Jack didn’t see any other choice. He swam a few feet over from the opening and found a ledge along the muddy slope that he figured was big enough to hold his gear. Then he beckoned to Sloane, using his hands to try and communicate what he was going to do. When she began reaching for the clasps of her own tank, he grabbed her wrist and shook his head, hard. She had more than enough air to wait for him down here. But she shook her head right back, her eyes fierce behind her mask. He didn’t know if it was her fear of staying alone in the dark water or her determination to stick with him, but she wasn’t going to be left behind.

  Finally, Jack nodded. He tapped his fingers against his cheeks, miming a blowing motion to remind her to exhale on the way up. Then he unhooked the clasp of his own oxygen tank, pulled the straps off of his shoulders, and watched as Sloane did the same. He rested the equipment on the ledge, still breathing through the attached regulator, and faced the opening. When Sloane was ready next to him, he gave her hand a quick squeeze. Then he yanked the regulator out of his mouth, switched off his air, and pushed off with all of his strength, thrusting himself headfirst into the opening of the marble drainpipe, Sloane one kick behind, exhaling bubbles as she went.