by Ben Mezrich
The woman was still struggling, her muffled cries emanating from beneath the bulging pink leaf wrapped around her head, but the plant was much too strong. Slowly, the kicking slowed to a sullen twitch.
“There’s only one bitch in this garden,” Sloane said. “And her name is Dionaea muscipula.”
Then she turned and headed back the way she had come.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Jack tried as the killer named Vika advanced toward him, her javelin hanging ominously from her left hand. “I’m really not that bad a guy. In fact, most people find me charming.”
A grimace moved across Vika’s features, and Jack noticed she was both limping and favoring her left side. Even so, he didn’t give himself much of a chance, one arm pinned to a tree, the other gingerly reaching behind his back.
Without warning, Vika lunged forward, the javelin aiming directly for his chest. Jack barely got the iták out in time to parry the ivory blow, simultaneously spinning his body away from the tree, using all his weight to tear free from where he was pinned—leaving a good portion of his sleeve still attached to the birch.
“Goddamn it,” he said as he came to a stop with his back to the ivory steps, his fingers moving beneath the collar of his tattered coat. “That was my favorite jacket.”
The woman spun around to face him, raising the javelin.
“You talk too much,” she grunted, now in obvious pain.
Jack could see blood on her lips, and he wondered how much longer she could stay on her feet. Long enough, he figured, so he did the only thing that came to mind. He lowered his shoulders and charged.
He hit her low, just below the point of the javelin, driving his entire weight into her waist, and they both toppled toward the ground. Even before they hit dirt, she’d somehow spun him around so that he landed flat on his back, and then her impossibly strong thighs were around him, pinning him down, her left hand raising the javelin above his face. Then the ivory was flashing downward—and at the last second, Jack moved his head, the javelin flicking at his earlobe, sticking half a foot into the packed ground next to his skull.
Jack drove his left hand upward, catching her right below her bottom rib—and suddenly her face turned white and her thighs released. Jack rolled out from under her and got into a crouch. He felt the dirt shift under his heels, and when he looked down, he realized he was right on the edge of the deep moat. He could hear hissing and spitting from below. He gasped, trying to move forward, but suddenly Vika was right in front of him, another javelin coming out of the holster on her back.
“Your luck is about to run out,” she said, coughing blood.
She raised the javelin over her shoulder, taking aim at the center of his chest—and then suddenly, she froze.
Her eyes went wide, and then her entire face seemed to go slack, her lips twitching above her teeth. A glaze swept across her pupils and she stumbled forward, the javelin sliding from between her fingers, dropping harmlessly to the ground.
Jack stepped to one side, watching as she took the last few feet in a blind stagger—and then she toppled forward into the moat. She landed with a thud, and then there was a furious hissing, followed by the sound of dozens of jaws snapping open and shut.
Jack slowly opened his left hand; between his second and third finger was the jagged scorpion stinger he’d taken from the pouch around his neck.
He tossed the stinger to the ground and retrieved his trusty iták. He was about to head into the garden to search for Sloane when he heard a loud creak from high above. He turned just in time to watch Jendari Saphra open the top of the bronze sarcophagus.
“It’s really her,” Jendari gasped.
Jack felt frozen in place.
“Jack!”
Sloane was rushing toward him. The second killer was nowhere to be seen, which meant Sloane had somehow beaten the woman. Still, there was no telling how many more of the dark-haired killers were on their way. Jack knew they should be heading into the river, trying to find a way out—but instead, he found himself transfixed by the billionaire on the raised platform.
As he watched, Jendari reached into the open sarcophagus and carefully cradled something heavy in both of her arms. As she leaned back, lifting the thing out of the bronze coffin, Jack saw that it was a body; small, almost childlike in size, encased in solid orange amber.
“It’s her,” Jendari repeated, her voice turned solemn. “The power—the infinite power. Just a single one of her trillion, trillion cells. To cure disease. To fix aging. Maybe even to live forever.”
Jack swallowed, still frozen in place.
“The Tree of Life,” he whispered.
He could feel Sloane staring at him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of the body.
“Every culture that has ever existed, every religion, every civilization on Earth—don’t you see? The Tree of Life—it’s based in reality.”
“You mean the oak?”
“Not the oak. The body in the amber. The Tree of Life isn’t a plant, it’s her, it’s—”
Before he could finish the sentence, a familiar streak of white shot upward from deep within the moat behind him. The javelin hit Jendari in the dead center of her chest. She staggered backward, still holding the body encased in amber. Then she looked down, and Jack followed her astonished gaze into the moat—
And there, lying on her back, covered in slithering asps, was Vika, her eyes momentarily clear, fighting the snake venom that would assuredly kill her and the scorpion poison that would lubricate the way.
From above, Jendari gasped, blood spattering from her lips.
“Why?”
“I have my orders,” Vika said. “Você é indigno.”
This time, Jack understood the words. You are unworthy. He watched as Jendari collapsed backward beneath the amber and toppled directly into the open sarcophagus.
And at that precise moment, Jack felt a strange, cool change in the air.
“Sloane,” he said. “I think we’d better—”
But he never had a chance to finish his sentence. There was an eardrum shattering crack, followed by a terrible gushing sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Sloane screamed, pointing to one of the stone walls of the chamber. Jack saw it too: The wall was bulging inward. He looked around and saw that the other walls were bowing inward as well. His stomach dropped as he realized what was happening. Jendari’s fall had triggered something in the structure of the vast cavern. They had entered the cavern via a river, and now it appeared that the three walls around them were barely holding back three more rivers, making four. In a moment, they were going to be a the epicenter of a truly biblical flood.
“This isn’t good,” he gasped. And then he had a sudden idea.
He grabbed Sloane’s hand and leaped forward through the jungle, running as fast as he could toward where they’d left the wooden sarcophagus. The sound was getting louder by the second.
“Faster,” he screamed, leaping over a root. “Into the coffin!”
He half threw her the last few feet over the brush, and she clambered over the edge of the sarcophagus. He dove in after her, landing on top of her prone body, his weight sending the vessel straight back into the river. He pushed himself up, leaning over the edge, paddling furiously with both hands. As he worked at the water, he searched the far wall and finally spotted his goal: the small, tunnel-like opening he had seen on their way into the cavern. He had no idea where it led, or if it would be wide enough for the sarcophagus. But he also knew they didn’t have much of a choice. They were running out of time.
“Come on, come on, come on,” he hissed, using his hands and the current to guide them the last few feet—and then thankfully, the front of the coffin slid into the opening. He threw himself flat on top of Sloane, face-to-face.
“Stay down, keep your eyes closed. And for the love of Eve, hold your goddamn breath!”
And then there was a sound as loud as Armageddon itself�
�the three walls collapsing, the rivers rushing in, tsunami-high walls of water instantly filling the chamber. Suddenly the water hit them like a fist from behind, rocketing them forward through the narrow tunnel—and everything went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Two bodies clasped together in the bottom of a sarcophagus, tearing forward at a mind-numbing velocity, ricocheting through the narrow tube of solid rock, fountains of wood splintering off as they skidded through a half-dozen curves, and then, without warning, they were suddenly barreling straight upward on a geyser of pure liquid. For a brief, nauseating moment Jack felt completely weightless, and despite his own warning to Sloane, he opened his eyes and lifted his head. He saw that they were arcing up at breakneck speed toward what appeared to be a pane of pure, glowing crystal—
And then he frantically lowered his head just as they crashed right through, into blindingly bright daylight. Wind whipped across the wood beneath them, then there was a terrifying jolt as they made contact with the ground and skid forward on a sheet of sand, tossing up clouds of thick dust behind them. Jack lifted his head again and saw that they were speeding down the side of an enormous dune. Ahead of them, at the base of the dune, he could make out a wide glade of sand. There were shapes moving across the sand, and it took Jack a moment to realize the shapes were children: ten, maybe twelve kids kicking a soccer ball between them, laughing and shouting at each other in Arabic, running and playing—and then, as one, the children froze, staring up at the dune.
The sarcophagus slid the last ten yards down the slope, then shot out into the sandy glade—finally coming to a stop in the center of the children, inches from the forgotten soccer ball.
Jack coughed, spitting up water and dust, and he felt Sloane pushing out from under him. She peered out over the edge of the sarcophagus, saw the sun and the sand and the children, and then she smiled, maybe the first real smile he had seen from her. Still, the kids didn’t move, rooted in place, staring in stunned silence.
Jack leaned out of the sarcophagus, grabbed the soccer ball, and tossed it toward the nearest kid. It bounced once, then landed at the kid’s feet. The kid looked at the ball—then turned and ran. The other kids followed his lead, and a moment later, Jack and Sloane were alone in the water-logged coffin.
Jack looked at Sloane and shrugged.
“It’s been that kind of a week.”
“Jack, that body in the amber, it was—”
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“And now it’s gone.”
He shrugged again. Amber was a pretty resilient material. There were samples of amber that had been dated back to many millions of years. A body encased in amber could survive millennia, perhaps even more, submerged beneath four rivers’ worth of surging water.
“Everything, gone,” Sloane said. “After all we’ve been through, we’re left with nothing to show for it.”
Jack thought for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket pocket.
“We’ve got this.”
He pulled out his hand, and between his fingers hung the red leaf he had plucked from the ancient, thorned vine.
Maybe it wasn’t an ancient corpse encased in amber, or a bronze segmented snake, or proof of a mythical culture. But it was certainly enough for a career-saving paper. Perhaps even enough to earn a botanist her tenure—or perhaps at least a transfer to an Ivy League institution, maybe one where the sweaters came in orange and black and the graduate students bickered like the bratty little prodigies that they were.
Sloane reached for the leaf, but Jack held it just out of range, so that she had to move closer, right up next to him—and he figured this was as good a time as any to do something stupid.
So he leaned forward and kissed her.
And to his surprise, she actually kissed him back.
EPILOGUE
The man in the bright orange construction helmet wiped sweat off the back of his neck as he climbed into the front cabin of the eleven-hundred horsepower Komatsu D575A bulldozer, settling himself noisily into the oversize vinyl bucket seat. Even before he reached for the ignition key, he could feel the massive power beneath him; the two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-ton beast, nearly forty feet front to back from the corrugated steel blade on its articulated pneumatic arms to the posterior edge of the rear rubber treads, was by far the largest dozer in production. Certainly it was more than enough machine for the job ahead—and his ride was just one of seven matching D575s lined up next to each other at the edge of the deserted village.
Any moment, the man in the orange helmet knew, the order would come in and the phalanx of dozers would roar to life. Ten minutes after that and the village would be gone; in its place, nothing more than a flattened glade of mud. The man had no idea how long it would take the rainforest to remove all trace that the village had ever existed, but judging from the dense growth he’d seen on the way down to that shit-strip of a jungle airfield, he guessed months, rather than years.
As he waited for the onboard intercom to cough up the command, he half wondered what this little, insignificant speck of a place at the edge of the Amazonian rainforest had done to deserve such an ignominious fate. But he didn’t ponder the question for long, because things like that were way beyond his pay grade. He was simply there to do a job, and he’d learned long ago, when the orders came in, it was best not to ask questions.
Really, there wasn’t anybody to ask, anyway. Just job contracts that came in, periodically, attached to envelopes loaded with cash. Delivered by couriers who knew even less than he did. Even the name at the bottom of the contracts raised more questions than answers.
The Euphrates Conglomerate. And who the hell were they?
Deep pockets, that’s who they were. The kind of pockets that could afford seven of the biggest goddamn bulldozers on Earth for a simple demolition job in a sweltering corner of a billion-acre rainforest.
The man in the orange hat grinned, thinking of those cash-laden envelopes as the intercom finally crackled the single-word command through the humid air. Then he leaned forward in his bucket seat and reached for the ignition.
