Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  Jack pointed to the seat next to Andy, where Dashia was quietly reading her tablet computer, oblivious to the winding ascent up the four-thousand-foot mountain. If the nauseating turns, four-hundred-foot cliffs on either side of the snake-thin road, or shallow oxygen were bothering her, she wasn’t showing it. She’d had her head in the tablet since they’d left Cusco, by way of the mountain train ride down to the valley city of Aguas Calientes, the last stop before the ascent to the base of Machu Picchu. Jack knew that before the twenty-two hour flight from Delhi to Lima, Dashia had downloaded enough data on the Peruvian Wonder of the World to write her own guidebook; but somewhere between the flight and the harrowing bus ride up to the site, she’d switched gears and was now sifting through the various symbols of Incan mythology.

  “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” Jack asked. “See how she stays in her seat and doesn’t bother the other passengers?”

  “She doesn’t know any better. She’s never seen a bus topple over the edge of a mountain cliff. And there’s only about six other people stupid enough to take this death ride at five thirty in the morning—and five of them look like they’ve got one foot in the grave already.”

  Andy waved toward the front of the bus, where a group of elderly ladies were chatting away in the front two rows. One of the women was actually knitting as the bus corkscrewed up the mountain road, her shiny metal needles flashing whenever the rising sun peeked in through breaks in the trees and cliffs around them.

  Aside from the gray-haired women, who had been right ahead of them in line when they’d boarded the bus at the station in Aguas Calientes, there were only a smattering of tourists and Peruvian locals taking the journey at this hour, just as Jack had hoped. He knew that by midday, the Wonder would be crowded with tourists—camera phones flashing, video cameras churning—which would only make their task that much more difficult.

  Jack glanced at Sloane, who was seated next to him on the two-seater, right up against the open window. She’d spent the first ten minutes of the ride gaping at the view: the rising mountain peaks that flashed between the gaps in the trees, and the four-hundred-foot sheer drops toward the valleys below that appeared at random intervals along the serpentine road. There were metal guard rails set up around the most jagged of the turns, but for the most part, they were relying on the reflexes of the driver, a middle-aged Peruvian with a Yankees cap pulled down low over his eyes and a cigarillo hanging from his pursed, chapped lips.

  About midway into the ride, Sloane had obviously had enough of the stomach churning panorama and had asked for the parchment again, which Jack dutifully retrieved from the zippered pocket of his backpack, now propped against the floor beneath his feet. Since leaving the Taj Mahal, they had both taken turns going over the pictogram; Jack was pretty sure he had at least the basics of the riddle figured out, but he was still waiting for Sloane’s input. They had spoken very little since leaving India, and he was beginning to think that she might be suffering from a bit of shock. After all, it wasn’t every day that you’re almost buried beneath twenty thousand severed hands.

  When Unger failed to meet them at the rendezvous point, they had been picked up by Andy and Dashia and had headed directly to the Delhi airport. Jack didn’t think anyone had seen them enter or exit the Taj, but they’d just infiltrated the most celebrated building in the world and had caused a fairly seismic change in the deepest subfloor of India’s most famous national treasure. Then again, Jack was pretty certain that the snake segment and the parchment had been beneath the Taj long before Shah Jahan had constructed the upper levels of his marble love story.

  “Trust me,” Jack said, still watching Sloane with the parchment. “The ride up is way better than the ride down.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Sloane asked.

  “Once. I was fourteen, so I don’t remember much. I kind of ran through the site.”

  “You were with your father?”

  Jack nodded, though that wasn’t completely accurate. He had traveled to Peru with his father, and they had checked into a hotel in Cusco together, but that was the last he’d seen of the man for the entire eight-day trip. Jack had been entirely on his own—no money, no credit cards—selling off items from both of their suitcases to buy food from the local markets. He’d taken a few day trips on his own to the famous hot springs in Aguas Calientes and up to Machu Picchu, but he’d spent most of his time at the hotel, sitting by the oversize bathtub they called a pool, waiting for his father to return. Twice, he had called home to check in with his mother, but she’d been too busy dealing with Jeremy’s issues—shuttling him home from school early because he’d locked himself in a janitor’s closet to get out of gym, disassembling a moped engine he’d connected to the vacuum cleaner to see how fast he could get it to move across the living room—to understand his predicament.

  Eventually, Kyle Grady had returned carrying an Incan Chakana, the stepped cross of the Incas, made entirely of gold, with stories of a tribe of Peruvian jungle dwellers who had incorporated a stash of Incan antiquities buried beneath their main house into their own animistic religion. He hadn’t even understood why Jack was furious with him. By fourteen, Kyle Grady had been living with Pygmies in Borneo, while his own parents—Jack’s grandparents—went on monthlong safaris across the Horn of Africa.

  “You’re lucky,” Sloane said. “My parents never took us anywhere. Well, we did go to Disney once, but the trip got cut short when my oldest sister tried to run off with the monorail driver. Christine was very advanced for fifteen.”

  Jack and Andy both stared at her.

  “Was that a joke?” Andy said.

  Sloane shrugged, the expression on her face as cool as ever. Then she pointed to the parchment.

  “So you’ve been to this Temple of Three Windows? And you’re sure that’s what this pictogram is guiding us toward?”

  Jack noticed that her voice had gone down an octave as she switched conversational gears, and out of reflex he touched the heavy backpack on the floor in front of him with one of his feet; he had one strap around his ankle, just to keep it from sliding out into the aisle every time the bus took a particularly winding curve. He’d made that adjustment five minutes into their ride up the side of the mountain, when the bus had made its first hairpin turn—sliding so close to the metal guard rail that separated them from a two-hundred-foot drop that he thought he saw sparks—and both he and the backpack had nearly toppled across the aisle and into the lap of the poor young woman who was sitting across from him.

  Then again, the way the no more than eighteen-year-old girl had smiled at Jack when he’d apologized for almost crushing her, Jack wasn’t sure she would have truly minded. Her dark brown eyes had flashed at him from beneath razor-sharp bangs, and Andy, who had noticed the exchange from one row up, had rolled his eyes, then whispered something about Jack getting arrested for robbing the Mesoamerican cradle.

  “It’s a best guess,” Jack responded, comforted by the bulge of the three snake segments through the material of the pack that he felt with his foot. “The three trapezoids represent the Three Windows. They overlook the Sacred Plaza, a stone perch which is one of the highest areas of the ancient city. The Plaza is surrounded by the ruins of a number of sacred buildings, including the Principle Temple, with its sacrificial altar; it’s also close to the Intihuatana Stone, the hitching post of the sun. You get up there via a staircase that goes up from the terraced Main Plaza.”

  He could tell that much of what he’d said were just words to Sloane; she hadn’t had much time with Dashia’s notes, and to her, Machu Picchu was little more than an exotic destination she might have noticed in passing on a travel show, or seen on the back of someone’s postcard. Even the four hundred thousand tourists who made the difficult trek to the high altitude ruins every year knew little beyond the barest details about the site: a six-hundred-year-old, fifteenth-century Incan ruin sitting seven thousand feet above sea level, tucked into the Andean mountain range, c
onsisting of stone buildings, terraced greenery, and elaborate fountains and aqueducts. The fact that it was so remote and little understood was part of Machu Picchu’s charm—and the main reason it existed at all. Most experts believed the city had only survived the Spanish genocide of the Incan culture because it was so damn hard to find—and before planes, trains, and buses, almost impossible to reach.

  “These three windows had some sort of religious function?”

  “Like most of Machu Picchu,” Dashia said, over her seat back, “nobody’s really sure. There’s certainly a religious aspect to many of the hundred and fifty buildings that make up the site; some experts believe the entire place was some sort of sacred zone, built for worship. But others contend that it was a fort, or a royal palace, or even an astronomical research center. The Incans were obsessed with astronomy, and many of the buildings stand at precise astronomical points, corresponding to different positions of the sun.”

  “And the Chakana,” Sloane asked. “Is there one in the Temple of the Three Windows?”

  “There are Chakanas everywhere.” Jack shrugged.

  “But I assume if there is, it isn’t on fire,” Andy said.

  “Probably not. But it’s not an entirely surprising image. The Incas loved fire. Theirs was essentially a heliocentric religion. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the Incan god, Inti. He’s often portrayed as a flaming sphere with a face in the middle.”

  “The original emoticon,” Andy said.

  “And the Incan story of creation involves both the sun, the Chakana, and fire. Dashia?”

  She turned halfway in her seat, showing Sloane her tablet. On the screen was a picture of Inti, and below that, two flame-covered people, a man and a woman. The man was holding what appeared to be a golden staff, wedge-shaped, narrowing where it reached the ground.

  “Like most cultures, the Incan civilization started with a flood. The Creator, dissatisfied with the way primitive people were behaving, unleashed the ‘waters of the sun’ to extinguish mankind. When this flood of fire cleared, Inti, feeling bad for the few humans who had survived, sent his favorite son and daughter down from the heavens on a mission. He gave them a golden wedge, which they were to plunge into the ground. If they were able to penetrate all the way to the hilt with a single stroke, that was supposed to be the spot for mankind to build a new, pure civilization, to last forever. The Incas.”

  “Forever,” Andy said. “Or until a bunch of Spaniards inadvertently infected them with smallpox, then went about destroying all evidence of their existence.”

  “Okay,” Sloane said, ignoring Andy, “so we’ve got the Three Windows, and the cross, but it probably isn’t burning—”

  “Yet,” Jack said, and again he touched his backpack. He’d made a couple of stops in Cusco before they’d left for Aguas Calientes, and he’d put together a plan. Judging from their experience with the moondial and the red brick door, he had a feeling the pictograms were more than geographic clues. They were steps to be followed, a riddle that was meant to be solved.

  It was obvious from Sloane’s expression that she didn’t share his optimism as she re-rolled the parchment and handed it back to Jack. Maybe his methods weren’t scientific, but even so he was amazed that she could remain skeptical, with all that they’d discovered so far. Whatever mystery they had gotten themselves into, this was far outside the laboratory and the rules of science.

  He leaned forward, unzipping the top pocket of his backpack, and carefully placed the parchment back inside. Just as he was rezipping the pocket, the bus went into another turn, and the pack slid a few inches into the aisle. Jack reached for it, and nearly bumped heads with the pretty brunette teenager from across the aisle, who had also leaned down, probably to help him out.

  “Thanks,” he said as her hand reached out toward the strap. “Appreciate the help, but I’ve got it—”

  And then something flashed by the corner of his vision, followed by the hiss of steel against vinyl. Suddenly, the strap in his hand split down the middle—and the backpack was yanked out of his grip and across the aisle.

  Jack looked at the girl. She was half out of her seat, his backpack in her left hand. In her right hand was a knife. The eight-inch blade was shiny, serrated, and steel.

  “Hey,” Jack started, shocked—but the girl was moving quickly up the aisle, toward the front of the bus.

  Jack didn’t have time to think. He leaped after her, ignoring Sloane’s surprised yell from behind. The bus was still halfway into its turn, and Jack nearly lost his footing, but then he was moving forward, his hand outstretched toward the girl.

  She spun around, catching him with the hilt of the serrated blade in the dead center of his forehead. He felt a sharp pain explode through his temples, and he fell back, hitting the floor of the aisle spine first.

  He could hear Andy shouting something through the ringing in his ears, but the words were quickly drowned out by a rush of adrenaline and anger. He pushed himself back to his feet. The girl was now ten feet ahead, halfway to the front of the bus. The few other passengers were staring at her, but nobody was moving to help, which was unsurprising, considering the knife.

  Jack started after her, his anger continuing to rise.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he shouted.

  The girl paused, then turned to face him. His backpack was hanging from her left hand, the eight-inch serrated knife from the right.

  Jack slowly drew his two-foot-long iták out from behind his back. The girl looked at his machete and smiled.

  Suddenly, she lunged, the knife moving almost too fast to see. Jack barely parried her first blow, but in an instant her hand lunged the other way, and she caught the back of his grip with the hilt of her blade. The iták whirled out of his hand, spiraled through the air, and landed with a thud, point first, in the center of a nearby empty seat.

  The girl lunged again, the blade heading straight for Jack’s chest. At that very moment, the bus came out of the turn, and Jack used the momentum to sidestep her blow by mere centimeters. As she went by, he stuck out a foot, and she stumbled forward, losing her footing. She tumbled into the aisle, but even before she hit the floor, her legs were underneath her, readying for a catlike spring back toward him—

  And just then, Andy brought Dashia’s tablet down against the back of the girl’s head. Her body went limp, and she collapsed to the floor of the aisle.

  There was a screech of brakes; Jack nearly tumbled over himself as the bus came to a sudden stop. He whirled around, looked out through the front windshield, and saw canvas tents, stone steps leading up to a wooden gate, and a smattering of tourists heading into a group of metal turnstiles. They’d arrived at Machu Picchu.

  Jack looked back at the girl. She’d just started to move against the floor, and he came to a quick decision.

  “Move!” he shouted toward Andy and the rest of his team.

  He grabbed his iták and yanked it out of the vinyl seat, then quickly retrieved his backpack. He let Andy, Dashia, and Sloane pass by, then followed them toward the front of the bus, keeping one eye on the girl, who had made it to a knee. Then he was out the door and racing after his team, all of them running as fast as they could toward the turnstiles.

  “Who the hell was that?” Sloane gasped as they pushed their way to the front of the handful of tourists.

  Jack had no idea; but he didn’t intend to stick around to find out. Andy’s quick move had saved him from the girl and bought them some time. But Jack was pretty sure a computer tablet wasn’t going to keep someone like that down for very long—no matter how much data it contained.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jack took the last set of stone steps two at a time, half pushing Sloane ahead of him. The terraced grass of the Main Plaza had receded into the mist coming off of the mountains behind them, and Jack could no longer see Andy and Dashia, who they’d left camped out below by the entrances to the Royal Tomb and the Temple of the Sun. The tomb and the temple
were two of the most popular locations in the ruins, which meant there would be plenty of people around, and maybe even a security guard or two. Andy had pretended to put up a fight when Jack had insisted that his grad students stay behind as he and Sloane continued to the peak of the mountain by themselves, but Jack could tell that the incident with the tablet had shaken the kid pretty good.

  As Jack followed Sloane out into the open stone glade of the Sacred Plaza, his mind was still trying to deconstruct what had happened. Obviously, Sloane was doing the same, because as soon as they slowed their pace, both of them gasping from the high altitude exertion, she grabbed him by the wrist.

  “Shouldn’t we tell someone? Call the police?”

  Jack didn’t shake her loose, but he continued moving forward, picking his way past the few clusters of tourists who were milling about, using their phones to take photos of the various buildings that ringed the stone clearing.

  “Jack, do you hear me?” Sloane said, her fingers tightening. “We need to call the police. That woman tried to rob us.”

  Jack pushed through a group of German tourists gathered around a Peruvian guide who was using broken English and hand gestures in a futile attempt to give them details about the highest, most sacred level of the Incan ruin. In front of him, he finally spotted the entrance to the Temple of the Three Windows—basically a path that wound around a loose pile of stones. As he led Sloane toward the path, he lowered his voice.

  “I don’t think it’s as simple as that.”

  As much as he’d have liked to have believed that the incident on the bus had been a robbery attempt, there were too many things that bothered him about what had happened—starting with that damn serrated blade. He’d been robbed before, twice in the Philippines, once in Eastern Europe, and he’d also been threatened by assailants wielding knives on at least three occasions. But the blade that girl had been carrying wasn’t the sort of thing you picked up in a Peruvian pawn shop; it was a survival knife, military grade.