by Ben Mezrich
Suddenly, she opened her eyes. The pain was still there, a dagger lodged between her rib and her diaphragm; but the pain didn’t matter. Her life didn’t matter. What mattered was that she could still function, and as long as she could still function, she had a job to do.
She reached down, grabbed the leech between two fingers, and gave it a good yank. The creature hung on as long as it could, pulling her skin up over the piece of visible bone before its teeth tore free. She clutched the leech in her palm and squeezed until the thing burst, her own blood pouring down her wrist, pooling in the crook of her arm.
Then she rose to a sitting position, ignoring the new shards of pain that exploded down the right side of her body. She took a length of gauze out off of the low table by her makeshift bed and tucked it around the mud patch, hooking the Velcro tabs behind her back. Then she reached for her long, white underwrap—still stained with her blood and pierced through in numerous places—and began to wind it around her chest, flattening her bruised breasts.
She had been wearing the underwrap for as long as she could remember; like most things in her brutal life, it had two functions, one ceremonial, the other practical. Underwrapping was a ritual handed down since the dawn of her people—a recognition that although there were differences between men and women, these differences were only as relevant as the individual chose to make them. And from a practical standpoint, the underwrap made it easier to throw a javelin—or fire an automatic rifle.
Once the underwrap was in place, she pulled on her camouflage shirt, making sure to tuck it in tight to her pants so that the bulge of the mud-wrap barely showed. She knew from experience that an enemy could take advantage of any signs of weakness, physical or mental. Though she did not believe this particular enemy had the battle experience to use her wound against her, she never took chances. Even the most experienced foes got lucky. And Jack Grady, damn him, had been smart enough to use his luck like a weapon, again and again.
Vika rose from the mat and slowly crossed the stark interior of her hut. Each step sent more pain up her rib cage. As she moved, she also noticed that she still had a limp. When she had regained consciousness after the catwalk had collapsed beneath her, she had found herself lying facedown on a pile of stone; the first thing she’d noticed, even before the broken rib, was the two-inch piece of ivory sticking out of her ankle. She’d removed the ivory on the spot, fully aware of the irony of the moment. She’d killed Jack’s brother with a length of ivory not much longer than the piece that had ruined her ankle. He had nearly killed her with the same ancient material via a booby trap even older than the javelins she carried on her back.
The fact that Vika was still alive was a minor miracle, though it had helped that she had been on the top level of the catwalks, facing Jack head-on, when he’d lifted the urn off the pressure trap. Vika’s four operatives, who had all been working their way up the lower levels, had not been as fortunate. All four had been crushed beyond recognition by the falling stone. It had taken three hours for Vika to remove their corpses from the chamber and carry them back to her waiting helicopter. Unfortunately, she would not be at their burial ceremony; as soon as she’d landed in Brazil, she’d received the call from the surveillance team in Beijing.
Jack Grady had found what ought to have been the final clue beneath the last Wonder of the World—and once again, he had taken flight, on his way to what appeared to be a new, surprise destination. Vika’s team hadn’t been able to get inside the Old Dragon’s Head until after Jack and the botanist were gone; it appeared the anthropologist had secured himself a private flight to his next stop, provided by the billionaire brother of one of Jack’s father’s many past lovers. Even so, an hour behind the explorer and his companion, Vika’s team had found enough information in the underground chamber beneath the Wall to tell Vika exactly where Jack was heading.
He had a head start, but Vika was certain she would be able to catch him before he finished whatever it was his late brother had started. Already one of Jendari Saphra’s planes was waiting for her on the jungle runway. And Jendari herself was already on her way to Egypt. She wanted to be there in person. Obviously Vika’s employer believed that Jack was on the final leg of his journey, hours away from uncovering the secret she had been seeking for decades.
Vika should already have been on her way as well, but there was one more thing she needed to do before she boarded that plane. One more duty to perform, one more ritual that had to take place.
She reached the far corner of her hut, and with difficulty, dropped to one knee. Then she brushed her hand along the dirt floor, revealing the hooked metal handle of her buried drop box.
Vika felt a tremble move through her that had nothing to do with the opiates in her veins or the injuries to her body. The ritual had always affected her this way, even when she was just a child. Since the age of twelve, when her ailing mother had passed the duties over to her, she had made the annual pilgrimage back to her home, back to this hut, no matter where she was or what she was doing.
Over the years, the parchments had been scarce; for many years at a time, she’d found nothing inside the box. In 2004, she’d been asked to eliminate a minor politician in a small European country that she’d never even heard of before. In 2007, the parchment had asked her to retrieve and destroy a series of computer codes that had been used in the hacking of a Swiss Internet contest. In 2009, she had been asked to set up a surveillance team with access to Jendari Saphra’s private plane—it had contained a vault that had been quite tricky to access—until Vika had given a sample of Jendari’s hair to the scientists at Euphrates, who had then provided her with a special, and quite unique, skin-colored glove.
Since then, there hadn’t been a single parchment. And yet still, Vika had returned every year. Now, because of the events of the past week, for the first time in her life, she was two days late to the box—but she was here, and she was going to do her duty.
She pulled on the hooked handle, and the lid came open. Vika reached inside, and her fingers touched a roll of aged paper.
Vika paused, then lifted the parchment out of the drop box and broke the seal.
She read the words twice, then a third time to be sure.
And she understood.
Without a word, she placed the parchment back in the box, clenched her teeth against the pain, and deliberately rose to her feet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Ten minutes,” Jack whispered as he pulled Sloane by the wrist, dragging her away from the back of the crowd of Egyptian students gathered in the shadow of the Pyramid of the Pharaoh Khafre, with a final nod toward the two archaeologists from the British Museum who were leading the small educational tour around the most famous site in all of Egypt. “After that, they’re going to send someone looking for us. It was the best I could do.”
Given what Jack had pulled off at the Temple of Artemis right under the noses of the two archaeologists’ colleagues, it was more than he had expected from the two visiting experts, both on loan to the University of Cairo as part of a museum exchange. Jack had made the deal via the phone in Hinh Li’s brother’s private jet while they were somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. The archaeologists would let him wander free from their tour group for a brief amount of time, in exchange for his notes on whatever he’d found beneath their colleagues’ dig site in Turkey. When the time came to deliver, Jack felt certain the men from the British Museum would think he’d gone completely mad—at least until they’d journeyed into the pit themselves. Then, God only knew what they would think.
And if they had any idea what Jack was now carrying in his backpack as he rushed Sloane across the rapidly cooling sand beneath the early evening sun, they would never have let him leave their sight. The seven bronze segments had to be the greatest archaeological treasure in history, but to Jack, at the moment, they were just another riddle, one he felt certain he was about to solve.
“Jack,” Sloane said, pointing as she ran after him. “Chri
st, it’s enormous.”
Even in the shadows of the three towering pyramids of Giza, the Great Sphinx took one’s breath away. Over sixty feet tall, more than two hundred and sixteen feet long, made of solid, quarried limestone, the Sphinx rose up out of a depression in the sand, bordered on two sides by a high stone wall, with two small temples to its East, one resting almost between the sculpted creature’s extended paws. The facial features, though worn down by wind, sun, and time—and perhaps purposefully mutilated by one pharaoh or another—were still distinct enough to power even the most sedate imagination. A human face, beneath what remained of a pharaoh’s headdress, on top of a ferocious lion’s body. Jack knew that historically, the Sphinx could also be portrayed with a hawk’s wings; but even without the power of flight, the creature was terrifying, down to its macabre name.
“The strangler,” Jack said as they crossed the last few dunes that led past the low wall, toward the statue’s enormous haunches. “Derived from the Greek, it either refers to the way a lioness strangles its prey—biting down on an animal’s throat until it suffocates—or the way the demonic mythical creature put down those who answer its riddle incorrectly.”
Interesting that so many riddles embedded in pictograms had finally led them to the ultimate riddler, who had supposedly crafted the first riddle that mankind had ever encountered. The original Sphinx, guarding the entrance to Thebes, had asked every passerby: What walks with four legs in the morning, two legs in the day, and three legs at night? Only those who answered correctly—a person—were allowed within the city’s walls. Those who got it wrong were strangled and left in the sand to rot.
“And this angry, violent creature—it was originally a woman?”
Jack slowed as they approached the Sphinx from behind. They were alone, but Jack had no idea how long their isolation would last. Any minute and another registered tour group could come by, or an Egyptian army officer, or a security guard. If they were found wandering unattended, they’d probably be arrested.
“According to the ancient Greeks. It only became male when the Egyptian Pharaohs began using the creature to guard their pyramids and tombs. Recent scientific studies of our friend here’s facial structure seems to agree with the Greeks; there’s internal evidence of stonework indicating fuller, female lips, higher cheekbones, and a more feminine brow than what you see today. The fact that there appears to be a vaguely African nature to the facial structure is more open to debate, but other Sphinxes across Egypt have similar features.”
“Like the Amazonian women in our mural.”
Jack shrugged, then dropped to his hands and knees, crawling the last few feet to the base of the great statue—exactly in front of the spot where the woman in the ivory diorama beneath the Great Wall seemed to have been heading.
“What are you looking for?” Sloane said, lowering next to him.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But these riddles were meant to be solved. I’m hoping whoever has led us on this journey doesn’t want to leave us strangled in the desert.”
He paused as his eyes settled on a group of scratch marks near the very bottom of the Sphinx’s left haunch, right above a sweep of glittery sand. He reached forward and brushed the sand away. In front of him were three rows of hieroglyphics, mostly words he didn’t recognize. But right in the center, a single glyph he could see even when he closed his eyes:
Two snakes, intertwined, in a perfect double helix.
Jack glanced over his shoulder, making sure they were still alone. Then he opened his backpack and carefully began removing the seven bronze snake segments. He placed them in order on top of the sand, head to tail.
Almost immediately, the segments began to tremble. He could hear the sound of gears turning, and caught a whiff of something that smelled like burning metal.
“My god,” Sloane said, “how is this possible?”
Jack shook his head.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about Bronze Age science. Even though ancient cultures were primitive in many areas, they were also advanced in ways we’re still trying to understand. The Mayan and Incan facility with astronomy, the Egyptian and Greek abilities in architecture, the Chinese developments in math and language, the Indian’s spiritual depths—there was so much more going on than most people realize. Sophisticated gear-work, the science of magnets—these were things that we know have ancient, ancient pasts… .”
Jack went silent as the segments began moving to seal together, one after another: first the head they’d found at Christ the Redeemer, then the neck they’d found at the Taj Mahal, next the four body segments from Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza, the Colosseum, and Petra, and finally the tail they’d found in the base of the Great Wall of China. And then, as Jack and Sloane stared, the connected, mechanical bronze snake began to wriggle along the sand, slithering toward the base of the Sphinx. The head touched directly below the etched double helix, and suddenly the snake burrowed through, disappearing right into the solid stone.
The ground beneath Jack’s feet began to move.
Sloane grabbed his arm and yanked him backward. He fell on top of her in the sand, and together they watched as a trapdoor slid back, revealing a cubic opening three feet across. Instead of steps, they saw a stone ramp leading down into the darkness.
Jack looked at Sloane, his mouth as dry as the desert around them. Before he could say anything, she had already risen to her feet. This time, he let her lead as they headed through the trap door, and began the descent down the stone ramp.
• • •
They had only been standing at the edge of the rushing waters for a few minutes, but if felt like much, much longer, both of them caught in the spray from the underground river, listening to the echo of the fierce current as it reverberated off the high, curved walls of the vast cavern. The river was at least thirty yards across, God only knew how deep, cutting directly down the center of the cave and heading for about a hundred yards beyond the cone of light from Jack’s flashlight before surging left, out of sight.
“A river flowed out of Eden,” Jack whispered, “to water the Garden, and there it divided… .”
“Genesis, Jack? Really? The statue we just crawled through to get here is five thousand years older than the Bible.”
“The Bible, yes, but not the story. The Sumerians had the same garden, and the same rivers, nearly eight thousand years ago. The Veda of the Hindus had it even earlier than that. And, of course, when we get to the Tree of Life, we’ve also got the Koran, the Mayans, the Inca, the Chinese—”
“I don’t see a garden or any trees. I just see a river. A goddamn big underground river.”
Jack nodded, but his attention had suddenly moved from the water to the trio of large objects leaning against the wall behind them; he’d first noted the sarcophagi when they’d left the bottom of the ramp, a few yards to their left, but if Sloane had seen them, she’d been too busy staring at the rushing water to make any mention of it. Jack crossed to the closest of the three, playing the flashlight over its vaguely trapezoidal form. It was about a foot taller than he was, and twice as wide as his shoulders, shaped like a coffin with an ornately carved front showing the visage of an Egyptian pharaoh in full royal regalia, bound foot to neck in the burial fashion of the time. He reached forward and tapped his fist against the lid—and to his surprise, found that it was heavy rosewood, not stone. From the sound, it appeared to be empty.
Sloane turned at the noise and saw what Jack was doing.
“You’re not thinking—”
“You know that I am,” Jack said. “Come over here and give me some help.”
Sloane shook her head.
“I’m not getting in that thing. Hell, I don’t want to even open it. What if there’s something inside?”
“And you’re supposed to be the science-minded of the two of us? It’s empty, and even if it’s not, whoever was inside is long since dead.”
Jack gripped the edge of the sarcophagus and gave Sloane a nod.
Finally, she crossed to the other side. Together, they managed to drag the thing down from the wall and slide it across to the edge of the underground river.
Before Sloane could protest, Jack grabbed the lid and yanked it open. As he’d suspected, the oversize coffin was empty. The space inside was more than enough for the two of them. The only question that remained was how well it was going to float.
“You first,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You want to push me into the water and jump in before I float away? Look, I don’t see that we have much choice. Unless you expect Tom Sawyer to come floating by in a raft, this is our best option.”
“Even if this works,” Sloane said, “how do we get back?”
Jack paused. Then he shook his head.
“That’s the kind of question we ask when we get where we’re going.”
“Jack—”
“We’ll find a way,” he said. “Are you going to get in this coffin, or am I going to have to go the rest of the way on my own?”
Sloane exhaled, but then stepped past him and lowered herself into the front of the wooden sarcophagus.
Jack bent low, pushing with his thighs, and slowly slid the heavy vessel to the very edge of the river. The front tipped forward, and Sloane grabbed at the sides, emitting a terrified shriek—and then the base touched water, and the current began to push it forward. Jack hurled himself over the rear ledge, landing a few feet behind Sloane, and the momentum pushed them the rest of the way in; the front end dipped a few feet down with the motion, then the entire coffin twisted to the right, nearly toppling over. Thankfully, it righted itself, bobbing upward under their weight, and suddenly they were moving with the current, cutting across the top of the water like a spear. Jack carefully handed Sloane the flashlight, then leaned back against the rear of the sarcophagus.
