Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  Jack could tell by the way Sloane was watching him that she sensed his discomfort. On the trip from the Beijing Capital International Airport to the airfield on the southeastern edge of the vast city, Jack had given Sloane only the barest details about Hinh Hu Li: that she was the lead curator of the People’s Museum of Beijing and an expert in Chinese antiquities, specifically, anything having to do with the Ming dynasty that had ruled most of the country from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century. When they had reached the fenced-in airfield and were led through a pair of security gates by uniformed Chinese soldiers to the waiting helicopter—fiberglass and steel frame glistening in the morning sun, rotors already beginning to spin—Sloane had begun to pepper him with questions. But when she’d seen the woman for the first time, standing on the bottom step leading up to the passenger cabin, the questions had frozen in the air between them, and Sloane had been content to stare in silence. Late thirties, dressed in a stiff gray pantsuit open at the collar, five-foot-ten in high leather boots—Hinh Hu Li had that effect.

  Twenty minutes later, enclosed in the throbbing belly of the racing chopper, the woman’s aura was no less palpable. Unlike Jack, Sloane could only briefly take her gaze off the high-ranking academic’s dark, perfect features: lips like crimson clouds, eyes the shape of teardrops, pupils painted in pitch-black oil, cropped hair combed above brows drawn with the severity of cut glass. She was a beautiful woman—and that only made Jack even more uncomfortable, because it reminded him of how much he’d always hated her.

  “You’re definitely on the right track,” she was saying as Jack watched the helicopter’s shadow dancing over frosted waves through the thick glass to his right. “And I can understand why you thought of me. This pictogram seems to be referencing a particular section of the Great Wall with which I have an intimate familiarity. But I believe you’ve gotten two things wrong.”

  Still avoiding eye contact, Jack turned from the window to see her shift the curved fragment of stone that she held in her hands so that both he and Sloane could see the tiny picture imprinted next to the final segment of snake, the twisting serpent’s tail:

  “The image in the pictogram is not another snake,” she said, pointing with a sharp, red nail. “And it’s not an apple.”

  Jack felt Sloane shift in the seat next to him as she leaned forward to peer more closely at the piece of stone which they had carefully cut from the urn Jack had removed from the interior chamber at Petra. Unlike on the banks of the sinkhole in Chichen Itza, Jack had immediately searched the urn for the snake after he’d removed the sixth bronze segment from within the hollow vessel. When his flashlight flickered across the colored image on the inner wall, he’d had Andy run out and find him Magda’s sharpest dagger to hack his way to the next pictogram.

  Even before Jack had seen the image, he’d known where they were headed next. The problem was, he’d also known exactly who he’d needed to contact to help them decipher the final pictogram—and also give them access to the last Wonder of the World, the Great Wall. The tiny picture on the inside of the urn of a scaled, serpentine, fanged creature, wrapped around a spherical piece of fruit, had made Sloane think again of the Garden, and of Adam, Eve, and a snake bearing an apple. But Jack had known better. He’d let Sloane run with her theory, only because he hadn’t wanted to tell her what he’d known the instant he’d seen the pictogram. The image hadn’t only led him to a particularly intriguing section of the Great Wall of China. It had also led him straight to the woman he still blamed for shattering his parents’ marriage fifteen years ago.

  “You can see here,” Hinh Li continued, “the creature has feet. There are three claws on each appendage, running around most of its elongated torso. And its head is equine, with pronounced nostrils, and teeth that are reminiscent of a crocodile. It’s not a snake. It’s a dragon.”

  Jack turned back to the window. He had been only sixteen when he’d met Hinh Li for the first time, in the apartment in LA that his father had rented for the two of them. She’d been one of Kyle’s graduate students, only a handful of years older than Jack and Jeremy. Even at that young age, Jack had known that his anger toward her had been immature and unfair; Kyle Grady had checked out of his relationship with the twins’ mother long before. But seeing his father like that, laughing and smiling with a woman half his age—even one who shared his passions, his sense of adventure, his love of the exotic—had filled Jack with difficult emotions.

  Of course, that relationship had been as doomed as Jack’s parents’; Hinh Li had lasted about as long as the apartment in L.A., which Kyle soon traded for a mud hut in a Kenyan village. Hinh Li had headed back to China, where she’d risen through a combination of brilliance, hard work, and impressive connections. Her father’s brother was one of the top bureaucrats of an industrial province that included much of the country’s rich copper processing plants, and her own brother was the founder of a Hong Kong–based, government backed social network that had made him a billionaire by his midtwenties. The helicopter they were traveling in was his; the two pilots in military uniforms in the front cockpit were courtesy of Hinh Li’s uncle—and they came with a piece of paper from Beijing that would get them past any local security stations without any explanations necessary.

  “The spherical fruit has slight cross-hatching,” Hinh Li said, showing Sloane. “It’s a common gongbi effect. It symbolizes a softness of surface. Like a peach.”

  “A dragon,” Sloane said. “And a peach.”

  Jack nodded, understanding. “The peach tree is the Taoist version of the Tree of Life. According to legend, somewhere in the countryside stands a magical peach tree, and on this tree a single peach grows every three thousand years. Whoever eats the peach is granted immortality. It’s cyclical symbolism, similar to the Mayan calendar; the peach is reborn every few millennia, offering mankind a shot at transcending his own mortality. And it’s kind of an opposing story to the Judeo-Christian version, where the forbidden fruit growing on the tree makes man mortal, rather than immortal. But it’s still a Tree of Eternal Life.”

  The pilot’s voice broke over the headphones, speaking in clipped Chinese. Hinh Li responded, then shifted back to English as she pointed again to the pictogram.

  “Right. In the Taoist legend, wrapped around the base of the tree sleeps a coiled dragon. The dragon acts as the tree’s roots, lodging it to the Earth, while the tree’s branches are protected by a phoenix, who guards the way to heaven.”

  “So the dragon is benevolent,” Sloane said. “No fire breathing, eating knights, kidnapping maidens—”

  “In the East, dragons aren’t the mythical monsters that they are in your culture. Benevolent dragons are interwoven into our history—in fact, dragon worship dates back to the beginning of Chinese culture. The earliest dragon sculptures we’ve found go back to before 5000 BC. Dragons protected emperors, guided kingdoms, and are, to this day, considered the emblem of successful people. Chinese mothers want their children to grow up to be dragons.”

  Hinh Li was looking right at Jack as she said this, and he forced himself to finally match her gaze. Her full lips turned up at the corners. It wasn’t the first time she had called him a dragon; the day his father had left them both alone in the apartment, off on one of his first journeys to Africa, she had used the complementary term as she’d packed her bags. At the time, Jack had shrugged it off, lost in his teenage anger. But as he’d gotten older, although he hadn’t ever forgiven her, he’d understood that she was just another casualty of his father’s adventuresome spirit.

  “Some anthropologists believe that dragons have a real world basis,” Jack said, trying not to dwell on the past. “Perhaps the concept of the dragon grew out of contact with prehistoric snakes, or maybe a fear and respect for Crocodylus porosus—an enormous species of crocodile that used to roam ancient China. Another theory is that unearthed dinosaur bones led early Chinese storytellers to imagine giant reptiles years before we discovered dinosaurs ourselves in the
West. In fact, the Chinese word for dinosaur is Konglong—great dragon.”

  “So you do remember some of your Chinese,” Hinh Li said. “Good to know our weekly lessons left some impression.”

  “You left an impression, all right, but I don’t remember more than a handful of words.”

  “What we choose to forget is sometimes more important than what we choose to remember,” she responded.

  Then she pointed out the window to where the shoreline had suddenly changed from rock outcroppings and cliffs to a low, gravelly slope running parallel with a paved road.

  “We’re three miles south of the Shanhaiguan Pass, in Hebei Province. Up ahead is the eastern beginning point of the last portion of the Great Wall to be built by the Ming dynasty, somewhere in the mid-sixteenth century.”

  “The mid-sixteenth century?” Sloane asked. “I thought the wall was much older than that.”

  “Sections of the wall go back three thousand years. The oldest part was built somewhere around 700 BC, but much of the wall has been rebuilt many times, by the different dynasties who ruled China. Altogether, the Great Wall stretches almost thirteen thousand miles east to west, and in some places reaches as high as a hundred feet. It’s mostly stone, brick, and mortar, a barrier meant to protect from Mongol invaders, but also to control the spice trade—and often, to keep the peasant class from emigrating when times were hard.”

  “Thirteen thousand miles,” Sloane said. “That’s quite a haystack to sift through.”

  Jack tapped the helicopter window with a finger, and Sloane leaned closer, just in time to see the paved road end, replaced by a stretch of beach-like sand. And then, rising up from the shore, a stone, almost medieval-looking section of wall jutting right out into Bohai Bay. Where the stone met the water rose a sturdy, castle-like tower with arched portals and small stone lookout. In front of the tower, the wall continued into the water for about sixty feet.

  “My god,” Sloane whispered. “It’s shaped like a—”

  “Like a dragon taking a drink from the bay,” Hinh said. “This is Old Dragon’s Head—it’s the easternmost edge of the Great Wall. Built by the Ming dynasty in 1560, it was destroyed by Japanese warships in 1904, during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. In 1980, my government rebuilt the landmark, down to the very last stone.”

  The helicopter passed directly over the castle, and Jack could see that it was deserted, the stone path leading out over the water glistening from the spray of the waves that crashed against the high outer walls. He knew that usually, the place would be crawling with tourists from Beijing and the outer villages; but Hinh Li was more than just a glorified tour guide. The presence of the two military officers in the front of the helicopter were just one indication of the lengths she had gone to help him out. And all he had told her was that it had something to do with Jeremy’s death.

  He realized, as he turned back from the window and saw the pensive look on her exquisite features, that she wasn’t simply trying to help, she was also attempting to make amends.

  “It really does look like it’s leaning out onto the water, drinking from the bay,” Sloane said. “But if it was built in the midfifteen hundreds, then rebuilt in the 1980s—Jack, that piece of urn is two thousand years old.”

  Jack watched as Hinh Li held the shard more carefully, the pictogram still visible between her fingers.

  “Like I said,” she responded, “sections of the wall were rebuilt by each ruling dynasty, including the Ming. Old Dragon’s Head was built on top of previous construction, then repaired numerous times over the centuries. There is a small alcove in the basement of the dragon’s snout that still contains an original section of the Wall.”

  “And you’ve seen this image there?” Jack asked.

  Hinh Li hadn’t been surprised when he’d first described the pictogram to her, and asked about an association with the Chinese Wonder of the World. And she had simply taken it as a matter of course that he would trust her with such a seemingly important task, along with the bare bones of what had happened to Jeremy. As conflicted as he had been about her being in his father’s life, he knew she had always loved Kyle Grady. Telling her hadn’t been a great risk—Jack knew there was no more room for risks. After the attack at Petra, he’d even sent Andy and Dashia back to Princeton, and he would have packed Sloane along with them, had she not continued to insist that this was where she was supposed to be. That woman who had confronted him at the top of the catwalks—he had never seen anyone as cold and terrifying before. He had no doubt that she would have killed him without a second thought. He hadn’t seen her body, but he assumed she was now lying in the rubble of many tons of two-thousand-year-old sandstone. But he didn’t know how many more like her were still out there, waiting, watching, ready to try again.

  “I can give you one hour alone at the site,” Hinh Li said, in way of an answer. “After that, the guards stationed farther down the Wall will start making phone calls.”

  “Hinh Li,” Jack said, “I don’t really know how to thank you—”

  She waved him off, then carefully handed over the shard of urn and watched as he returned it to the front pocket of his backpack. When he looked back at her, she was still watching him, a spark behind the darkness of her eyes.

  “Your father would be—”

  “Proud?” Jack heard himself interrupt, more emotion in his voice than he would have liked. “My father doesn’t even know that my brother is gone. My father is off on another one of his adventures, and I haven’t spoken to him in more than a year.”

  She reached across the cabin, touching his hand as the helicopter suddenly shifted downward, descending roughly toward the sandy beach.

  “I was going to say, your father would be right here next to you, chasing dragons.”

  Jack felt a shiver move through him, and he found himself suddenly flashing back to one of the last times that he, his brother, and their father had all been together. The twins couldn’t have been older than thirteen, and Kyle Grady had somehow convinced their mother to let him take his two kids camping for a night. For Jeremy, the entire week leading up to the endeavor had been sheer torture; just the thought of being out in the woods, away from his computer and the safety of his bedroom, had filled him with terror. When the day finally came, Jeremy didn’t speak a word the entire ten-hour drive to the campground.

  To both twin’s utter surprise, when they arrived at the campsite, they discovered that Kyle Grady had exchanged the planned tent for a rented RV—and had turned the entire interior into a makeshift computer lab, complete with sat-link and all the latest gaming systems. He’d given Jeremy a hug, and then he’d handed Jack a flashlight, and the two of them had set off into the woods for the first of many outback excursions.

  That day, Jack’s father had shown how much he loved both his sons—those two complementary zygotes. And where Jeremy was a complex child Kyle Grady never truly understood, Jack was cut from a cloth that his father knew as well as his own skin.

  Hinh Li was right; Jeremy wasn’t the only reason Jack was in China, risking his life to chase a mystery that seemed to grow deeper with each clue he found. He was in China because like his father he was born to go into the bush.

  • • •

  The bright orange flames licked at the brick-ceiling work as Jack held the wooden torch in front of him, carefully navigating the last few steps of the corkscrew stairway that led down into the lowest section of the ancient stone Wall. He guessed they were at least thirty feet out into the bay; he could hear the waves crashing against the outer walls on both sides, and he could feel the pressure building in his ears, the dampness in the air increasing with each descending step.

  Sloane followed him in silence, staying close enough to be able to see her footing in the flickering circle of light from his torch. He’d found the torch after they’d gone through the second set of locked doors that led from the touristy part of the tower complex into the older, interior halls that harkened back to thi
s section of the Wall’s Ming-era past. The key ring Hinh Li had provided before they’d disembarked from the helicopter had gotten them to the stairwell, but now they were on their own, working deeper into the base of the drinking dragon’s head.

  Jack slowed as he stepped off the last step and into a narrow, cramped passageway. The ceiling was so low he had to hold the torch at chest level, the heat from the flames stinging his cheeks and making his eyes tear. After another five yards straight ahead, the passageway curved to the left—and Jack found himself entering the alcove Hinh Li had described. The passageway widened by a few feet, and the ground shifted from packed mud to paved stones, each slab the size of a man’s head. The walls on either side were lined with antique Ming-era suits of armor hanging from wooden hooks pounded directly into the stone. Shiny bronze breastplates, pewter helmets, and heavy wooden shields, as well as a handful of halberds, axes, and spears.

  A few more feet, and Jack saw that the alcove was essentially a dead end; but as he got closer, he realized that the back wall was actually three separate stone panels, each reaching from floor to ceiling. Even from a distance, he could tell that the panels were much older than the rest of the alcove; the stone had a faded, charred appearance, with roughly hewn edges that had obviously not been worked by any modern cutting tool.