Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  “I thought this was a Treasury.”

  “Actually, that’s a misconception. It was originally a tomb, built around the time of Christ. Over the years, a number of legends of it being a storage house for hidden treasures sprang up, which led to it being renamed. The most famous of these legends was that Moses himself had stopped here on his journey to Israel; at Aaron’s behest, he’d hidden some of the gold he’d taken from the Egyptians, then continued on his way.”

  Jack couldn’t see Sloane’s eyes, but he could tell that she was staring at him.

  “Moses’ gold, here?”

  Jack pointed to the top of the citadel at the peak of the second floor of the façade almost eighty feet above his head.

  “There,” he said. “In that urn.”

  Even through the wind and sand, Jack could make out the stone sculpture: three feet high, oblong, with curved arms that almost looked like wings, standing atop a circular base. The rounded sides of the urn were covered in pockmarks.

  “The pictogram.”

  “Exactly. The pockmarks are actually bullet holes. The Bedouin believe that some of Moses’ gold is hidden inside that urn, and when they ride by on their camels, they often fire their rifles at the stone. But all indications are that the urn is solid, through and through.”

  It was almost too perfect, Jack thought to himself. A pair of axe-wielding Amazons guarding a stone urn that was supposedly full of gold. If he’d thought it through before, he wouldn’t have even needed the pictogram to know where he was supposed to go next.

  As he started forward toward the façade, he reached into his long white robes and retrieved his folded-up metal grappling hook. Andy was right behind him, but Sloane paused, still staring at the urn.

  “You’re going up there?”

  “We’re all going up there,” Jack yelled, through the wind. “It’s too dangerous for us to be separated. Right now, we’ve got the place all to ourselves, but that could change.”

  He hit the switch on the edge of the grapple, and the spiderlike claws flicked open. Andy was already pulling the heavy rope out from under his own robes. Jack approached the rock face and began scanning for a good place to make their ascent. As cliff climbs went, it wasn’t going to be difficult to chart a path up to the story of the façade; there were many gaps and cracks in the red sandstone, and even with the wind, they shouldn’t have much trouble pulling themselves up along the rope. He knew that Andy was up to the task, and from what he’d seen of Sloane so far, she could certainly keep up.

  The truth was, Jack had wanted to climb Petra ever since he’d first come through that Siq, years ago. He had just been looking for the right excuse.

  • • •

  “I don’t think I can make it,” Sloane hissed as Jack held out his hand as far as he could, trying to reach to where she clung to the stone eagle, her long blue robes billowing around her like a typhoon’s waves. “I can’t reach.”

  The terror in her voice was palpable, but Jack tried his best to ignore it, extending his body from the ledge of the citadel roof. Andy was holding him by his legs, helping to keep him steady as he tried to grab Sloane’s extended wrist. Again, he missed by inches.

  “You’re going to have to jump,” he shouted, over the wind. “It’s only a few feet. I’ll catch you.”

  Sloane yelled something back, but her expletives were lost in the wind. Jack glanced down at the eighty-foot drop to the stone floor in front of the Treasury. A little higher up, he could barely make out Sloane’s veil where it had caught on one of the Greek columns, a fleck of blue against the red-white stone.

  “I promise I won’t let you fall.”

  Sloane looked at him, her face pressed against the eagle’s beak. Then she nodded. She took one last breath, her porcelain cheeks tight against the rock, and then she leaped toward him through the air. Jack reached out with both hands, nearly kicking Andy off the citadel roof behind him, and made a grab for her wrists. At the last second, his fingers touched skin, and he pulled her toward him, using her inertia to swing her onto the citadel roof behind him. Then he grabbed Andy by the back of his robes and yanked him back onto his knees.

  Jack exhaled, tasting sand and sweat, then turned his attention to the urn, which was between the three of them at the peak of the sloped citadel roof. Up close, the bullet holes were like miniature craters in the stone. Jack could only guess at how heavy the thing might be—one hundred, two hundred pounds? From a few feet away, it appeared that the archaeologists were right, that it was solid through and through. But Jack hadn’t climbed the façade to break into the urn.

  “Thirty degrees to the back and left,” Sloane said, a tremble in her voice. Jack could see that her eyes were red, but he didn’t know if it was from the sand, or the fear.

  Jack nodded. Dashia’s enlarged version of the pictogram had been clear. It wasn’t a broken urn that the image had shown, but a tilted one. Jack crawled closer and put a hand on either side of the sculpture. The stone felt cold against his skin, a single bullet-made crater digging against the base of his palm.

  He pushed as hard as he could, using his shoulders and thighs, ignoring the pain in his ankle and the stinging sand against the back of his neck—and the urn started to move. Barely at first, centimeter by centimeter, but then more smoothly, as if on tiny ball bearings. Jack kept pushing until the thing was at the proper angle, back and to the left—and he felt a slow rumble beneath his legs. For a brief second, he feared that the citadel was about to collapse beneath them. He grabbed the rope, right up near where the grapple was still dug into the lip of the citadel’s roof, but then Andy was jabbing his shoulder and pointing to a spot directly above the urn where the façade met the uncarved cliff.

  A dark, oval opening had appeared in the solid rock. Grooves in the stone directly behind the urn led into the opening—where they disappeared into complete darkness.

  Jack looked back at Sloane and Andy.

  “It appears that Moses liked a good climb,” he said, grinning.

  And then he started up the grooves and into the darkness.

  • • •

  Jack held the lit flare high above his head as he pulled himself up the last groove and out onto a stone ledge that overlooked an interior cavern stretching a good fifty feet in every direction; the walls were rough and red, streaked with white like the exterior of the cliff and the cavern floor—another ten feet below the ledge, stretching out ahead of him like the semi-circle of an amphitheater—was covered in thick sand. But it wasn’t the floor or the sand that caught Jack’s attention as he peered through the orange glow of the flare. It was the elaborate stone catwalk that ran up the far wall: three connected platforms, with more of the ladderlike grooves rising up along the wall between them, each no wider than the two-foot ledge on which he now stood. The platforms weren’t attached to the wall; instead, they appeared to be held up by thin, cylindrical columns, two on each side, all of them approximately fifteen feet high. Unlike nearly every other surface of the cavern, the columns contained no red at all. Their curved surfaces were smooth and a much purer shade of white than the flecks and stripes within the sandstone.

  Andy nodded toward the top platform of the catwalks.

  “I think that’s where we’re supposed to go.”

  Jack saw it too; at the very end of the top platform stood another urn on top of a small, circular pedestal.

  Without wasting any more time, he swung his legs over the ledge where they were standing and dropped the ten feet to the sand. He sunk into the sand almost to his calves, then started forward, using the flare to search the ground in front of him for any signs of traps or triggers. Or snakes, or spiders. Jack pushed the thought away; when you couldn’t see your feet, it was never good to imagine things with fangs.

  He could hear Andy and Sloane plodding along behind him, but he didn’t turn until he reached the grooves leading up to the first platform. By then, his flare had just started to die down, so he tossed it to the sand and l
it a second one. The orange flame flashed against the closest cylindrical support columns, and he reached out with two fingers to touch the sheer white material.

  Ivory. His mouth went dry as he remembered the sliver that the pathologist had removed from his brother’s rib cage. The ivory columns brought him right back to that lab, yards away from Jeremy’s autopsy table. He knew that ivory was a material used extensively by ancient cultures; no doubt the Amazons had a fascination for the hard, yet pliable material as well. He wondered, If these columns are more evidence of an Amazon connection, does that extend to the ivory in my brother’s chest?

  He thought back to the two robbery attempts. Both of his assailants had been women. What if they were Amazons? It was a preposterous thought. Even if the snake segments had been left by Amazons, the idea that remnants of a culture had survived in secret for so many millennia was unthinkable.

  Jack took his hand off the column and moved to the first set of grooves leading upward. Then he began to climb.

  By the time they reached the top catwalk, all three of them were breathing hard. Although Jack’s first step off the grooves caused the entire catwalk to rock a few inches in either direction, the stone felt stable enough to hold their weight. Still, they moved forward carefully, keeping close together, all three holding onto the rope, which was grappled to a jut in the wall near the roof of the cavern, ten feet above.

  “It’s smaller than the one outside,” Andy said. “Moses must have dropped some of his gold on the way up.”

  Jack approached the urn slowly, holding the flare out in front of him. The urn was about half the size of the one on top of the Treasury, and its surface was devoid of any pockmarks or carvings. It still appeared to be made out of stone, but even from a few feet away, Jack could see flickers from his flare glancing inside the lip of the vessel; it seemed to be hollow. He also saw that a few feet above the urn, a pair of grooves led to another oval opening in the wall similar to the one they had come through from outside. Perhaps another way out, or maybe a dead end—it was hard to tell. Jack turned his attention back to the urn.

  “Looks like it’s hollow,” Jack said.

  He was about to reach for the urn with his free hand—when he noticed something about the circular base that the urn was sitting upon. It wasn’t a single stone; it was a number of circular stones, each a few inches thick, piled one on top of another.

  Jack felt a shiver move through him, and he quickly held up his free hand, stopping Sloane and Andy. Then he lowered himself to one knee, peering closer. At the very back edge of the stone circles, he saw it: a long sliver of ivory, almost thin enough to be invisible, leading from the bottom of the base to the top of one of the ivory support columns.

  “An ενεργοποιούν,” he said, using the ancient Greek. Andy exhaled—his Greek wasn’t as good as Dashia’s, but he obviously understood. Sloane touched Jack’s arm.

  “What is it? A trap?”

  “A pressure scale. These stones are held down by the weight of the urn. The original design is ancient Greek, but there’s evidence that the origins are much older. It’s pretty sophisticated, actually—”

  “What happens if you remove the urn?” Sloane interrupted.

  Jack waved with the flare.

  “Not sure, exactly.” He bent forward again to take another look at the strip of ivory—and just then, something whizzed by his right ear and exploded against the rock wall to his right.

  Flecks of sandstone rained down onto the catwalk, and Jack grabbed Sloane by her robes, pulling her down next to him. Andy was already flat on his stomach, peering over the edge.

  “Three of them!” Andy said. “They just came through the tunnel from outside. Shit, Doc, I think they’re armed—”

  Another bullet cracked against the wall, inches above Sloane’s head. Jack’s jaw clenched. He grabbed Sloane’s hand and pointed to the opening above the urn. She nodded as another bullet whizzed by.

  Jack knew he had to move fast. He could already hear footsteps moving across the lowest of the three catwalks. He gripped the flare tight in his hand, then rolled to the edge and flung the flaming stick as far into the air as he could.

  Gunfire erupted, and the flare jerked and twisted as it spiraled toward the sandy floor of the cavern. The catwalk around Jack descended into darkness, and Jack pulled Sloane over him, shoving her toward the urn.

  “Jump!” he hissed.

  She didn’t even pause, hurling herself over the urn toward the grooves that led up to the opening. She hit the wall hard, gasping, but her hands found the grooves and she was moving upward. As she pulled herself into the opening, Jack grabbed Andy by the arm and yanked him forward.

  “Your turn!” he yelled, pushing Andy as hard as he could.

  Andy let out a yell as he leaped, just missing the top of the urn. For a brief moment it seemed like he was going to slide right down the wall, but then Sloane was reaching down, grabbing him by the collar of his robes and yanking him upward. He clawed at the grooves, and then it was just his legs dangling out of the opening as Sloane pulled him the rest of the way.

  Jack was about to leap after them when he heard a noise directly behind him on the top catwalk. He turned as a yellow flare burst to life.

  The woman stood still as a statue at the far edge of the catwalk, one hand nonchalantly holding a military-grade flare, the other caressing the grip of a semiautomatic handgun. She was dressed in desert camouflage-her long, lithe body hidden beneath flashes of gray and brown. Her long, dark hair was pulled back behind her head in a severe ponytail, and her face was the shape of a diamond, her eyes vaguely almond, narrowed to near slits.

  “Dr. Grady,” she said, in a thick, unplaceable accent. “You’re much taller than your brother.”

  She said the words as if she were simply stating a fact, but Jack was suddenly hit with a burst of white-hot rage. His eyes drifted from the gun in her hand to his rope, which was now on the floor of the catwalk by his feet, still attached to the grapple that was hooked into the wall. While the woman watched, he slid the toe of his boot under the rope, then returned his attention to the woman’s chiseled features.

  She cocked an eyebrow, amused.

  “You’re very resourceful. But what do you think you’re going to do with that? Climb out of here like a spider on a web?”

  Jack could hear more footsteps below them on the second catwalk. Andy had counted three assailants, but there was no way to know how many more were on their way into the cavern.

  “We’ve already done spiders,” Jack said.

  And then he smiled, slowly extending his right hand behind his back, his fingers reaching for the lip of the hollow urn, just a few feet away.

  The woman followed his motion with her eyes, her gaze moving past his fingers to the urn, then down to the rounded stones—and then her expression froze.

  Just as the gun shifted up, Jack lunged backward, grabbing the urn and lifting it off of the stone base. There was a sudden crack, and then the catwalk lurched inward as the ivory columns twisted free. The woman’s gun went off, the bullet glancing across Jack’s left shoulder, tearing through his robes and slicing an inch out of his skin—but then the woman was tumbling downward, toward the center of the lurching catwalk.

  In the same moment, Jack’s boot flipped upward, sending the rope flying into the air. He caught it with his free hand just as the entire catwalk disappeared beneath him, taking the woman, her flare, and her gun with her, hurtling toward the floor fifty feet below. He caught one last glimpse of her as she pirouetted through the air, her hands clawing at one of the falling ivory columns as she desperately tried to break her fall—and then she was gone, and Jack was swinging hard into the wall. Thankfully, the grapple held. The stone knocked Jack’s breath away, but somehow he managed to hold on to the urn. He could feel that there was something inside, but he didn’t have time to look.

  He pulled himself up along the rope, then found a ledge large enough to support his weight. T
hen he detached the grapple and flung it toward the opening where Andy and Sloane had just disappeared. The grapple caught, and Jack was clambering after them, the urn tucked tightly under his arm. As he pulled himself into the opening, he cast one last look down toward the floor of the cavern.

  The three stories of catwalks were nothing but a pile of stone and ivory, dark, jagged shapes rising up from the sand. He thought he heard a groan in the darkness, but he didn’t see any movement. He felt his teeth touch the air.

  That was for Jeremy.

  Then he yanked himself the last few feet into the opening, leaving a small trail of blood from his shoulder along the stone wall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sixteen hours later, the choppy waters of Bohai Bay flashed by beneath the bulbous Plexiglas windows of a Chinese-built private helicopter. Jack’s shoulder throbbed along with the rhythmic beating of the helicopter’s blades, his wound still fresh beneath a thick wrapping of gauze and medical tape. Jack had changed the bandages himself in the airplane lavatory minutes before they’d begun their descent into Beijing; no doubt, if he’d had the time to stop at an emergency room after his team had worked their way out of Petra, and—with Bedouin help—toward the international airport in Amman, the flesh wound would have earned him a handful of stitches. Instead, he’d had to get by on desert medicine, which had consisted of a foul-smelling salve mixed up by one of Magda’s wives and a half a tube of Neosporin from Andy’s first aid kit. After what they’d just been through—as close as they’d come to death at the hands of that terrifying woman—Jack counted himself lucky.

  Jack tried to ignore the pain as he clung to his seat belt harness with both hands, forcing himself to concentrate on the woman’s voice that was now echoing through the heavy headphones pressed against his ears. The roar of the chopper and the way the damn craft kept banking hard to the left to avoid sudden outcroppings from the clifflike shoreline made the task difficult—and the woman’s thick Chinese accent certainly wasn’t helping. Even though she was just a few feet away, seated directly across from him and Sloane in the passenger cabin of the aging machine—furnished in faded leather, from the harness digging into his chest and waist to the oversize seats, built-in minibar, and interior walls—they may as well have been miles apart, and not just because of the quality of the radio transmitters of their headsets or the language barrier. No matter how important Jack knew the information she was giving them was to their journey to the final Wonder of the World, Jack simply couldn’t do the one thing that would have made the distance between them disappear. He couldn’t look her in the eyes.