by Ben Mezrich
“Machu Picchu,” he said. “The sacred, lost city of the Incans.”
It made chronological sense. Machu Picchu had been built sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, two hundred years before the Taj Mahal, and was the next of the Modern Seven Wonders in terms of age. If this snake segment had been hidden here when the Taj Mahal was built, then it would have been possible—as crazy as it sounded—to reference an architectural wonder that had been built before it was. Though from what Jack remembered from his South American history, Machu Picchu had been lost for centuries, only rediscovered by an explorer in 1911. Then again, that didn’t mean the ruins were lost to everyone.
“Jack,” Sloane said—but he was still running through it all in his head.
“One segment beneath Christ the Redeemer, the next at the Taj Mahal. A third somewhere in Machu Picchu. Where is this leading us?”
“Jack. Shut up for a second and listen.”
Jack looked up, surprised by her tone. Then he noticed it, too.
“The echo,” he said. “It’s gone.”
He could only think of one reason why the echo would have disappeared. He looked up toward the ceiling and saw that a panel had suddenly opened in the curved marble, maybe twenty feet above. There was something shifting behind the opening.
“Move!” he shouted, shoving the segment and the parchment into his wetsuit.
He leaped off the base and grabbed Sloane by the wrist.
“What the hell—”
“Go, go, go!” he yelled, tearing across the detailed floor, dragging Sloane behind him.
They had made it halfway to the collapsed brick door when he heard the first crash; despite himself, he glanced back over his shoulder—and saw the open coffin disappear in a crush of white and gray objects falling from the opening in the dome. As he watched, another panel opened in the marble, and more of the objects began raining down into the tomb, plunging straight into the floor and shattering against the hard stone.
“Faster!” he screamed.
They were almost at the pile of bricks when one of the objects sailed right by Jack’s shoulder. He caught a glimpse of what it was out of the corner of his eye—and yanked Sloane even harder, pulling her up the pile and nearly hurling her through the opening. He dove right after her; just as he crossed out of the tomb and into the chamber full of statues, one of the objects glanced off of his extended calf, tearing a three-inch gash in his wetsuit. He hit the ground next to Sloane, then rolled over, staring down at his leg.
The object was still caught in the rubber of his suit by one of its five razor sharp points. Thankfully, the point hadn’t gone all the way through to his skin, and he didn’t appear to be bleeding.
He kicked the object off of him and watched as it clattered against the floor, landing at the base of the androgynous statue that still wore Unger’s moondial. Sloane’s jaw dropped open, shock evident in her eyes as she stared at the object.
A dismembered, skeletal hand, fingers outstretched, yellowed nails as sharp as daggers. Still aghast, Sloane turned back toward the opening to the tomb. Jack followed her terrified gaze. Beyond the pile of bricks, he could see the fountains of similar skeletal hands still pouring from the ceiling, piling up in the center of the room. The sarcophagus was already buried, the base where he had been kneeling, just moments ago lost beneath a growing sea of razor-sharp skeletal fingers.
Jack wondered how long it would take for twenty thousand pairs of severed hands to fill the entire marble tomb.
He didn’t intend to stick around and find out. He let Sloane help him to his feet, and then the two of them started back past the statues and toward the waiting drainpipe.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It looks like Christmas is coming early this year, Gordon Unger thought to himself as he tucked his cell phone back into his pants, right up next to the leather holster of his vintage, but fully functional, Luger semiautomatic. The Luger wasn’t the most accurate sidearm Unger owned; in fact, he had a fairly sizable armory tucked into a safe behind one of the glass display cabinets in the storage room not ten feet from the reinforced door that led to the souvenir shop outside. But the Luger was authentic, not just functional, and a man in Unger’s line of work knew the value of authenticity. His Luger had once been carried by a Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS; Unger had received the gun as part of a payment for a pair of rare jade Buddhas he’d liberated from a jungle tomb near the Indian-Bangladesh border, and he’d carried it with him ever since. Something about the long thin barrel gave him an extra edge of confidence, because it was a killer’s gun, not for show, not for decoration. It was a gun that had killed before, and would happily kill again.
Unger grinned his wolfish grin as he reached the reinforced door and made short work of the lock. As he pulled the door open, he imagined the look on Little Jacky’s face when the poor sod saw the gun again—this time, Unger would make sure he was out of Jack’s reach when he fired. Maybe the first bullet wouldn’t kill the boy, but it would certainly slow him down. Since the anthropologist and his lady friend had left Unger’s shop, he’d gotten a little nostalgic for the boy’s pop, his former friend; if Little Jacky handed over whatever he’d gotten from the Taj, maybe Unger would even let him go with that single bullet as a souvenir. Then again, the boy’s pretty friend might kick up a fuss, and then he’d have no choice but to do away with them both. Business was business, after all.
He’d gone two steps into the front section of his store, passing the shelves cluttered with cheap souvenirs, still thinking about Jack’s sidekick, when he noticed something strange. Normally, the minute he opened the reinforced door, he could hear Henry the Ravenous Rat hissing and scratching at the sidewalk outside—but for some reason, there was nothing but the normal cacophony of passersby, the errant honk of a triwheeled cycle, and the creak of a wooden rickshaw. He began to wonder if Henry had finally succumbed to his perpetual state of near starvation—and then he saw the woman, standing in the open doorway, her hand on the cracked glass. She was tall and lithe, with sharp, angled features and jet-black hair pulled back tightly behind her head in a thick ponytail.
“Sorry, love,” he said. “We’re closed. You’ll have to come back later.”
The woman ignored him, stepping fully into the store, carefully shutting the glass door behind her. He opened his mouth to say something else, then paused, confused. She wasn’t Indian, and she didn’t look like a tourist. Despite the heat, she was wearing black leather pants and a dark top made out of some sort of stretchy material; it might have been a bodysuit with a zipper that ran all the way up to her tan, toned throat. She had a matching satchel over her left shoulder, hanging down next to her thin, tight waist.
Whoever she was, she was beautiful, from her brown eyes to her long, muscled legs.
“Christmas and New Years,” he said, “All rolled into one.”
And then her eyes narrowed, and the skin of her face seemed to tighten, her chin and cheekbones suddenly sharp enough to cut glass. Despite himself, his eyes instinctively roamed downward—he couldn’t help noting that she was particularly flat-chested—but the way she was carrying herself, it didn’t seem natural. For some reason, he realized, she had tied her breasts down against her rib cage, beneath her bodysuit.
Unger could only think of one reason a woman would want to do that.
He drew the Luger out from its leather holster and held it out in front of him.
“I think you better turn right around, pretty lady. Or this isn’t going to end well.”
She looked at the gun, then back into his eyes.
“You’re right about that,” she said, in a strange, heavy accent.
And suddenly she was moving forward. Jack Grady had been fast, but this woman moved like lighting. He aimed the Luger and tried to depress his finger—but before he could finish the act, her hand had whipped forward and her own finger had caught just beneath his, keeping him from getting the shot off. In the same instant, her other h
and shot out, fingers extended, and she jabbed him hard in the throat, right below his jaw.
He staggered backward, gasping, as she wrested the gun from his hand and tossed it to the floor. Then her right foot came up, and her steel-toed leather boot caught him directly in his abdomen. He crashed backward through the open reinforced door, landing on his back on the floor, still clutching his throat as shards of pain erupted in his stomach.
She moved with him, still fast as a snake, slamming the reinforced door behind her. While he tried to push himself to his knees, still desperately fighting to catch his breath, she expertly engaged the door’s lock and reset the alarm.
He spat out a glob of bright red blood, then finally found his voice.
“Who the fuck are you?”
She stepped forward and grabbed him by his hair, then half dragged, half carried him over to one of the metal folding chairs. He tried his best to resist—until she brought a solid knee up into his groin. For a moment, all he could see were bright flashes of light. By the time he’d regained his senses, he was slumped against the metal chair, his arms wrenched back behind him. She was tying his wrists together with tight plastic cuffs.
Three seconds later, she was standing in front of him, and her face had relaxed, an almost indifferent look in her dark eyes.
Unger pulled at the plastic cuffs, and only felt them get tighter against his skin. In a moment, they’d be cutting off his circulation. He tried to kick at her with his right foot, but she simply stepped back, watching him, that damn indifference spreading to her full red lips. He even thought he saw a hint of a smile at the edges.
Who the fuck is this woman? Unger had been robbed before, numerous times; once, he’d even gotten shot in the process, taking a bullet in his left thigh, which had led to an infection that had nearly killed him. But this woman—Christ, she was something different. Something terrifying.
“What do you want?” he said, his eyes wild. He jerked his head toward the glass shelves and cabinets that surrounded them, toward the jeweled statues, antique weapons, and ceremonial masks. “Take whatever you’d like. I won’t be calling the police.”
She turned, looking over the shelves. Then she paused, focusing on one of the closer cabinets: the one containing row after row of ceremonial Indian masks. Unger knew that many of the masks were nearly priceless; one that he had acquired from a tomb in the Northern mountains had eleven matching rubies inlaid above the eyes. He had guessed he might sell it for twenty thousand in the markets across the border in Pakistan. Still, at the moment he’d have considered it a bargain if that mask would get this woman out of his store. Once she was gone, he’d try to find out who the hell she was—and then goddamn it, he would go after her.
“You want a mask? Go ahead, whatever you’d like.”
She crossed to the cabinet. Then she pulled her right sleeve over her hand—and smashed her fist, heel first, into the glass. The glass shattered, shards clattering to the floor. She reached into the shelves and retrieved a mask from behind a pair of elephant faces. Then she turned and held it in front of Unger.
He saw that it was metal, oversize, almost big enough to be a helmet, with a snout like a jaguar. He assumed it was one of the lesser Hindu deities; shit, who could remember them all? Then the woman turned the mask around and showed him that there was a small panel on the back of the mask, held shut by a single screw. She reached up with her other hand and slowly undid the screw, and the panel swung open.
“Mr. Unger, it looks like you’ve filed this one away in the wrong cabinet.”
Unger coughed, tasting blood. His wrists were burning where the plastic cuffs were beginning to cut into his skin.
“What do you mean?”
She pointed to the cabinet off to her left—the one full of antique torture devices.
“This isn’t a ceremonial mask. Although it is quite antique, and I’m sure immensely valuable. It’s from the mid-sixteenth century, a Mughal design. Quite effective, I’m sure. It was used primarily on traitors and thieves. I believe the proper term for it was Chuha Pinjare. Am I saying that right? Hindi was never my best subject.”
Unger felt his eyes widening. Chuha Pinjare. He made the translation in his head. The Rat Cage. She couldn’t be serious. Jesus Christ, she couldn’t be.
And then he saw her draw the rat out of her satchel. She’d somehow gotten a makeshift muzzle over Henry’s snout, and there were plastic cuffs around both sets of claws, but otherwise he looked as energetic as ever, twisting his rangy body back and forth as she held the rat in the air between them.
Then she was moving forward.
“Hold on,” he said. “I already said you can take whatever you want.”
She placed a leather boot-heel on one of his knees, holding him in place, and with a sudden motion, jammed the mask over his head. The metal felt cold and hard against his skin.
“What the hell are you doing?” he screamed, his own voice strange from within the confines of the heavy mask.
Her boot was still hard against his knee. He couldn’t see the rat, but he could suddenly hear it hissing and spitting, because now she had obviously removed the muzzle.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions, Mr. Unger. About a pair of visitors you had recently. I want to know why they were here and what, exactly, they were looking for.”
“Please,” Unger hissed as he heard the rat’s hiss getting closer “I’ll tell you anything.”
“No,” the woman said. “You’re going to tell me everything.”
Suddenly, her boot was off his knee and she had crossed around behind him. He felt a brush of cold air as she opened the little panel on the back of the metal mask.
“You crazy bitch!” he screamed, trying to lurch out of the chair, but her free hand was like a vise on his shoulder.
“Mr. Unger,” she said, leaning close to his left ear. “You have no idea.”
And then he felt something claw at the back of his skull as she pushed the screeching rat into the mask.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, Vika leaned against the edge of the round table in the backroom of the souvenir shop as she typed her report into the keyboard of her cell phone. In the background, she could still hear the rat clawing around within the mask, but the grave robber had long since stopped twitching. His body was slumped against the metal chair in her peripheral vision, but he barely rated notice anymore. Gordon Unger wasn’t simply dead, he was no longer relevant.
In the end, the grave robber had told her everything he could, and she had shown him some level of mercy. The mottled blue spots that covered his throat, where she had pressed her fingers for the four minutes necessary to fully end all brain function, would only add to the unique circumstances of his death; but the wonderful thing about the developing world—and specifically, these particularly rough and tumble slums of Old Delhi—was that you didn’t need to worry so much about the details. Another dead black-marketeer in this part of the world wasn’t going to raise any alarms.
Vika finished with her text, then hit the Send button and waited for her new orders. The interrogation had gone well; in her line of work, it was often the improvisational performances that rendered the best results. But Unger’s knowledge was far from complete. She was quite sure he had told her everything he knew. But he hadn’t known much.
As she’d just informed her employer, Jack Grady had indeed retrieved at least one significant item from Christ the Redeemer: an ancient parchment, imprinted with a picture of a segmented golden snake. Next to one of the segments, there had been a pictogram that had led them to the Taj Mahal. Supposedly, they had managed to get inside an underground chamber in the Taj and had retrieved another item—perhaps another parchment and another pictogram—but beyond that, Unger couldn’t say.
Vika had to admit, as she patiently watched the blank screen of her phone, that the anthropologist and his female companion were showing great resourcefulness; her surveillance team outside the Taj hadn’t
seen him enter or leave the complex, so if Unger was correct, and Jack truly had retrieved something from inside via a water entry, he had evaded some of her best operatives.
Still, she wasn’t concerned. She knew that given the order, she could take Jack out with as much ease as she’d handled Unger. Unger, at least, had been armed. And of course he’d had his pet rat.
Vika listened to what sounded like claws against bone as her phone finally blinked back to life. She read the text twice, then returned the phone to her pocket.
The order was clear: They were still primarily in surveillance mode, but if an opportunity presented itself to get a hold of whatever Jack Grady was carrying, her people had been given the go-ahead to make their move.
Vika rose off the table and casually headed for the locked, reinforced door. She didn’t need to rush—and she didn’t need a parchment to follow the anthropologist and the botanist, wherever they were headed next. She had operatives stationed at every nearby airport, bus depot, and train station who would quickly pick up his tail. And besides, her people were already scouting all of the remaining Wonders, as they had been for nearly a decade.
No matter where he went, he was going to be within her reach. And even if she wasn’t there to deal with him personally, she trusted her operatives like they were family—because, indeed, every one of them carried the same blood in her veins.
The blood of the warrior.
The blood of the Icamiaba.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Are you sure there’s somebody up there driving this thing? Because I’m pretty certain we’re about to die.”
Andy was leaning over the vinyl seat in front of Jack, holding on for dear life as the bus sped into another hairpin turn, jerking so far to the left, it felt like the damn thing was actually up on two wheels. There was a screech of rubber against pavement, a roar of diesel engines, and then they were through the turn and continuing up the steep, narrow road, tree branches scratching at the open windows on either side.
