by Ben Mezrich
Jendari opened her eyes and once again peered through the glass at the glowing calf in the tank.
Cloning a cow, adding a bit of jellyfish DNA to make it glow—it was a parlor trick compared to what Jendari knew was coming next.
She felt a chill move through her. To Sloane Costa, Mitochondrial Eve was a theoretical concept, a paper to be written in a prestigious journal, maybe something that could help her on her way up the pillars of academia. The poor fool—she had no idea what she and her anthropologist were chasing, no idea what they were nearing with every riddle they solved and every Wonder they conquered.
No idea that before they reached the final secret, Jendari would take it from them, and with it—she shivered again as she wondered, What if Dr. Benson and his scientists had something much more powerful than a jellyfish to work with?
Such science would change the world.
And whoever controlled that science would wield power beyond comprehension.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
One short flight from Lima to Cancun, then a three-hour drive in a cheap rental car, nearly bottoming out against the damn speed bumps that seemed to litter every road in the Yucatán Peninsula, followed by a couple of stops for more equipment, picking among the many contacts Jack had made years ago on numerous expeditions to study the aboriginal tribes that had once dominated much of the area—and here they were, transported backward eight hundred more years into the past from the already ancient ruins of Machu Picchu.
Jack stood next to Sloane behind a waist-high rope, staring up the ninety-one stone steps that led to the top of the Temple of Kukulcan, the grand, ninety-eight-foot-tall centerpiece to the Mayan Wonder of the World known as Chichen Itza—and all Jack could think of was snakes.
“Right there,” he said, nodding his head past Sloane. “Down from the top of the steps to that stone creature at the base. It’s supposed to end up right at his head.”
Sloane peered over the rope at the statue at the bottom of the pyramid: an enormous feathered snake, mouth wide open, almond eyes seeming to squint angrily in their direction.
“He’s a nasty looking fellow, isn’t he?”
“Kukulcan wasn’t known for his kind temperament. Then again, despite popular conceptions, the Mayans themselves weren’t the most gentle of people. The only things they loved more than calendars and astronomy were human sacrifices—and snakes.”
Jack wasn’t surprised he had snakes on his mind; he’d been staring at the pictogram on the parchment he’d retrieved from the burning cross at Machu Picchu for much of the trip to Mexico:
A tiny image of Kukulcan, the Mayan feathered snake deity, which he’d recognized at once, and a second snake rendered in black, curling across the parchment from above Kukulcan’s head to a spot below his flickering tongue.
Like anyone who had ever Googled the Mayan Wonder of the World, Jack was aware of the ancient pyramid’s most interesting feature: how twice a year, on exactly the spring and autumnal equinoxes, just as the sun began to set, a snakelike shadow appeared on the pyramid’s steps. Riding downward from the northwest corner, the shadow-snake descended ninety-one steps until it hit the head of Kukulcan—then disappeared until the next equinox.
Jack knew that the optical phenomenon was an incredible feat of both astronomy and architecture; nearly fifteen hundred years ago, the Mayans had been advanced enough to chart the sun and the stars with near perfect mathematical precision.
And yet, Jack hadn’t immediately understood how that phenomenon, so obviously referenced by the pictogram, could lead him to the next step.
It wasn’t until Sloane had taken her turn with the pictogram—and then asked a simple question—that it had dawned on Jack. If the Mayans were known for being mathematically precise, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that the pictogram associated with their greatest city might also be referencing that precision? Might precise mathematics be the solution he was looking for?
“If the snake shadow is supposed to connect with the snake god,” Sloane had asked, “then why does it seem to be passing right over his head?”
Finding a protractor somewhere between Peru and Cancun hadn’t been easy; but once Andy had located one in a drugstore inside the Mexican airport terminal, Jack had been able to look more closely at the pictogram from a mathematical perspective.
The shadow-serpent on the parchment didn’t just miss Kukulcan; it missed the feathered snake god by exactly twenty-three degrees. Once Jack had done the measurement, he’d suddenly understood where the pictogram was leading him—and he’d begun to come up with a plan.
Leaving Andy and Dashia at a well-populated resort in Cancun had been the first step of that plan. Neither of them had complained about getting a day to lounge around a pool shaped like a kidney bean; Jack only wished that he could have convinced Sloane to remain with them, though her company had made the three-hour drive through the jungle moderately bearable. Either she was starting to warm to him, or he was starting to see through her walled-in façade. They’d even had a chance to talk a bit about his brother—the reason Jack was so determined to see this mystery through.
Talking about Jeremy didn’t come easy for Jack, and not simply because of the guilt he felt for not working harder to be a part of his twin brother’s adult life. The wound left by Jeremy’s passing went back much farther than that.
Jack’s earliest memories of his brother barely resembled the strange, brilliant, and obsessive introvert his twin had grown into; on the playgrounds and backyards of their early childhood, they were just two little kids with personalities that complemented each other. In fact, Jack’s father had often joked that in the right light, you could see how close together those two perfect zygotes had been. Even as a child—five, six years old—Jack had been the headstrong one, a wild kid, climbing trees that were too tall for him, diving into lakes that were too deep, picking fights with bullies that were twice his size. And it was Jeremy who had been there to pick Jack up off the ground, drag him out of the water when it got too rough, and call for the teacher when the bullies got the better of him.
Even when things began to change—somewhere between the ages of nine and ten, when Jeremy’s trouble with social situations became a full-blown disability and he started to recede into the lonely world of his neurosis—there were still moments that stood out in Jack’s mind, flashes of a bond that seemed deeper than mere brotherhood. He’d tried to describe one of those moments to Sloane as the jungle flashed by on either side of the winding road from Cancun.
“There was this tree house our dad had built in our backyard,” he’d started, keeping his gaze focused on the strip of road ahead of him. “Well, it wasn’t really much of a house. More like a wooden board hanging between two branches that could just barely support our weight. But we’d sneak out there once in a while, after our mom would fall asleep. I’d bring an empty mayonnaise jar to try and catch fireflies; Jeremy would just lie on his back and count the stars. And I mean he’d really count them, sectoring up the sky using astronomical charts he’d memorized, making sure he didn’t miss a single one. And I remember, I’d ask him: ‘Why, Jeremy, what does it matter how many there are?’ And he’d just look at me, sitting there next to him with my little jar filled with bugs. And then he’d go right on counting, all the way until morning. I didn’t understand until years later. For Jeremy, it wasn’t the number of stars that mattered, it was the counting. It was this ten-year-old kid in a world that was rapidly turning more and more terrifying, taking control of something so vast and incredible as the entire night sky.”
Sloane hadn’t said a word, but Jack could tell that she’d understood. From the outside, Jeremy might have seemed damaged and bizarre; but to Jack, he had always been that little kid in a tree house counting stars—all the way to the end. And Jack—the wild, adventurous half of that zygote out in the wilderness with his empty mayonnaise jar, chasing bugs—couldn’t shake the feeling that he had failed his brother.
He didn’t
intend to fail Jeremy again.
He put a hand on the rope in front of them, then gave one more glance over his shoulder, making sure they were alone.
“Good to know American dollars still have value in some places,” he said as he lifted the rope so Sloane could go under. “Although we’ll be sharing a room from now on.”
Altogether, it had cost two hundred dollars to get them alone at the edge of the pyramid. The first hundred had gotten them through the front entrance gate, even though it was an hour after the official closing time; Jack had read online that the site offered special “sundown” viewing for those willing to make the guards out front an offer, and once inside, Jack had been lucky enough to find a second guard who was happy to make sure they got some time by themselves at the pyramid itself. The man hadn’t questioned why a couple would want to be alone at sundown at one of the great Wonders of the World. It wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal—not with the Cenotes, the ceremonial sinkholes where the Mayans used to toss their human sacrifices, within a stone’s throw—but it had its charms.
When they’d first entered the site, they’d played the part of privileged American tourists, walking hand in hand in a clockwise circle around the central section of the site, hoping as they went that none of the guards would notice the oversized duffel bag Jack had brought with him from the rental car. From the visitors’ entrance, they’d crossed by the Great Ball Court, a rectangular playing field with stone rings attached like sidewise basketball hoops on either end. Jack could only imagine the viciousness of the games that had been played there—especially considering that the entire losing team would usually be killed, their bodies tossed into one of the sinkholes. From the Ball Court, they passed by the Temple of the Jaguars, a smaller pyramid than the Temple of Kukulcan, as befitted a smaller form of deity, and skirted the Sacred Cenote, the largest of the great sinkholes, which was essentially an ancient well, thirty-eight feet deep, that acted as a natural source of irrigation to much of the old city. Then the Platform of Venus, the Temple of the Warriors, the Astronomical Observatory—and at last, the main event: the Temple of Kukulcan, where they’d arrived just minutes ago.
Jack wasn’t wearing a watch, but he could tell by the way the sun was beginning to dip toward the top of the pyramid that they were pushing things very close. Sundown couldn’t be more than a few minutes away, which meant they would have to move fast.
Once Sloane was on the other side of the rope, Jack grabbed his duffel and crawled under after her, then quickly started up the ninety-one steps. Although the pyramid had been off-limits to tourists since 2006, when an eighty-year-old woman had tripped and fallen down sixty of the steps to her death, Jack felt the architecture was much more impressive once you got up close and personal. Made up of nine limestone levels, the four-sided pyramid was perfectly symmetrical; ninety-one steps on each side, then one big step at the top, which added up to exactly three hundred and sixty-five steps, one for each day in the Mayan calendar.
Halfway up, Jack could already feel the sweat running down his back. The sun felt so low now that it seemed to be almost touching the top step.
“Faster,” Jack said—then noticed that Sloane was actually two steps ahead of him, her firm legs pushing her upward with practiced ease.
By the time they made it to the top, Jack was already working the zipper of the duffel bag. Sloane had her hands on her knees, breathing hard as she took in the view. From the top of the pyramid, it was mostly jungle, though Jack could pick out a few of the stone temples and the ant-hill shaped mounds that surrounded the nearby sinkholes. Then he turned his attention to the duffel, from which he retrieved a large black pouch, a drawstring hanging from one side.
He rose back to his feet and yanked the drawstring. The pouch unfolded with a snap, canvas material stretching across a tentlike, circular frame. Jack shifted the saucer-shaped frame, and a sudden burst of bright, golden light flashed directly upward as the embossed interior of the Sunburst photography reflector caught the rays of the rapidly descending sun.
“Portable gold,” Jack said.
He’d never been much of a photography buff, but his mother had dabbled at the art, and he was quite familiar with the various reflectors the professionals used to get the light just right. Once he’d figured out why the shadowy snake in the pictogram had been exactly twenty-three degrees off its expected mark, he’d known exactly what he needed. The Sunburst was the most powerful portable reflector on the market, and it hadn’t taken long to find one for sale through his contacts outside of Cancun.
The Sunburst unfolded, Jack took the plastic protractor from the airport drugstore out of his pocket and handed it to Sloane.
“You’re going to have to help me out,” he said as the sweat beaded across his forehead. “We need to aim this exactly twenty-three degrees off of the angle of the pyramid.”
Sloane raised her eyebrows. She looked over the edge of the pyramid, down the long flight of steps toward the base far below. Jack could see that she was working it through in her head—and she was beginning to understand.
“You’re going to recreate the equinox phenomenon of the shadow-snake going down the pyramid’s steps, but you’re going to put the shadow in the wrong place—by twenty-three degrees, like in the pictogram.”
“Actually, it’s the pyramid that’s in the wrong place, not the shadow.”
Jack had realized what the pictogram was pointing him toward the minute he’d first read the protractor.
“The Mayans were amazing astronomers and mathematically gifted,” he said as he positioned himself at the northwest edge of the top platform of the pyramid, then carefully lifted the reflector above his head. “But when they first set out to build this wondrous temple to their snake-headed god, they made one minor error. They began their calculations by presuming that the world was round.”
Sloane got down on one knee next to him, steadying the protractor at an angle flush with the downward slope of the pyramid’s steps. Then she carefully measured her way to twenty-three degrees off the slope—exactly as the shadow-snake image had appeared in the pictogram.
“But as anyone who remembers their eighth-grade Earth Science can tell you, it’s actually not. The Earth bulges at the equator and flattens out at the poles. Because of this, as the Earth revolves around its axis—and in turn, around the sun—it has a slight wobble. Over time, this wobble shifts the sun’s progress in the sky. Eventually, you get an error—of exactly twenty-three degrees.”
“But I thought this temple was properly aligned with the sun,” Sloane said, confused, as Jack shifted the reflector a few more inches to align it with her protractor.
“It is. But this isn’t the first Temple of Kukulcan that the Mayans built in this spot. It turns out there was an earlier temple, built one century before this one; the Mayans eventually realized their error, and corrected it by simply building a new temple over the old one.”
“So beneath us—”
“Is a temple that catches the sun exactly twenty-three degrees the wrong way. Like this.”
He shifted the reflector a few more inches, then held it steady, catching the last rays of the setting sun in the exact center. The sun’s reflection hit the northwest edge of the temple—and suddenly, a dark, serpentine shape slid down the first few steps. As the sun continued moving lower, the shadow grew, sliding step by step until it was more than halfway down.
“A few more seconds,” Jack whispered as Sloane stared almost in disbelief.
The shadowy snake slithered the rest of the way down the steps, extending to a full one hundred feet, and passed directly over the head of the statue of Kukulcan at the bottom.
“Now let’s see where this leads.”
He ignored the rivulets of sweat running down the back of his neck and the heat of the low sun against his forehead as he held the disk steady for a few more seconds. The serpentine shadow continued past Kukulcan, wriggled across the tops of trees and over the low, tangled brush, then suddenly
slithered up a low hill, above a stone wall—and over the lip into what appeared to be another one of the site’s many sinkholes.
“The Xtoloc Cenote,” Jack said, pulling the name from his memory. “The second largest well, after the Sacred Cenote. It would have been here at the time of the original temple. That’s where we need to go.”
“Into the sinkhole?”
Jack tried to think of something reassuring to say—but he was interrupted by a sound from behind, coming from the staircase that led back down to the front of the pyramid.
Footsteps, he realized. One of the guards must have decided to come after them—maybe looking for another bribe. Jack turned toward the noise, annoyed, just in time to see a flash of motion coming up off the last step and lunging in his direction. A woman with dark hair. In her right hand was a serrated knife.
Jack swung the reflector around and aimed the golden disk directly at her face. The last licks of the sun hit the disk and rebounded right into the woman’s eyes, and she covered her face, stumbling back. Before Jack could move, Sloane stepped forward and kicked out a leg, hitting the woman dead in the stomach.
The woman toppled backward, then hit the stone steps, tumbling down head over heels.
Jack stared at Sloane, but she was already moving down the steps on the other side, toward the Xtoloc Cenote.
Jack grabbed the duffel and followed, just trying to keep up.
• • •
“I don’t see her,” Sloane whispered frantically as they crouched at the edge of the sinkhole. “Was she the same one from the bus? How could she have followed us here? That knife—”
Jack shook his head. He hadn’t gotten a good look, but he thought this woman had looked a little older, and there had been streaks of brown in her black hair. A different woman, but with a similar military-grade knife. And again, he had gotten extremely lucky. A few more seconds, and the sun would have been too low for the reflector to do any damage. Already, the air around them had turned a dull gray color, accentuated by the thick, blanket-like mist coming up from the sinkhole. Jack looked down into the well, which was about thirty feet across, bordered on all sides by jungle fronds. The water was murky and brown.
